No longer the domain of research hospitals, brain imaging is moving onto basic-science campuses.

Pat McCaffrey

Over the last decade, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has broken loose from its medical diagnostic origins to become a must-have technology for basic researchers working in psychology and neuroscience.

In response, new research magnets are powering up around Cambridge. While the machines have traditionally been located at medical school campuses and research hospitals such as Massachusetts General Hospital, they are now popping up in basic-science centers. Last month, MIT opened the Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute for Brain Science, a university-based offshoot of MGH’s existing research imaging facility. Meanwhile, at Harvard, the new Center for Brain Science in Cambridge is building its own imaging core facility, scheduled to come online in 2008. Having these facilities on academic campuses promises to make the technology more accessible to faculty and students from a wider range of disciplines.

Driving the growing number of these machines is the widespread use of functional MRI (fMRI) to study a variety of brain processes and conditions, from neurodegeneration and dyslexia to decision making and depression. First developed in the early 1990s, the technology allows researchers to directly observe neuronal activity in the brain in real time by measuring changes in blood flow.

“Just like every lab needs a microscope, now brain research labs need neuroimaging,” says Harvard psychology professor and neuroscientist Randy Buckner. “Neuroimaging is becoming so widespread because it is useful for so many research areas.”

Buckner was recently recruited from Washington University in St. Louis to head up Harvard’s imaging facility.

“Our goal is to make imaging more accessible to a very wide range of researchers, for studies of high-level cognition, decision making, social cognition, development from childhood to advanced age, and for rigorous studies in psychology, in the life sciences, and the social sciences. By placing these technologies in the campus environment, they will be more accessible to faculty as well as students,” Buckner says.

When it comes online, the MRI facility at Harvard’s Center for Brain Science will cater to psychology faculty and also to interested researchers in philosophy and economics. The center’s executive director, Kenneth Blum, says it could help nurture new subdisciplines like neuroeconomics, which tries to understand how reward circuits in the brain play a role in decision making. He adds that the proximity to physicists, engineers, and chemists at MIT and Harvard will spur the development of next-generation imaging tools.

Also part of the plan is to give undergraduates hands-on experience in neuroimaging. That could give Harvard a big advantage in training students, says social psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Boston College. “It’s a real problem for institutions like mine that don’t have magnets. I can collaborate with researchers at other institutions to get imaging studies done. What I don’t have here is the ability to train students, and that’s the key to really moving this field ahead.”

Moving MRI machines from a medical setting to a laboratory can, however, present new challenges to basic researchers. While the scanning regimen itself is noninvasive and safe, working near such powerful magnets still requires clearly laid out rules and safety procedures that are new to academic lab culture. Labs will have to learn how to run their MRI facilities like mini-clinics that bring in children, the elderly, and people with chronic conditions to take part in studies.

A real problem with studies of this type is “incidental observation,” says John Gabrieli, director of MIT’s imaging center. What happens when a graduate student running an experiment notices something abnormal—say, something that looks like a tumor? “If you notice something atypical, you want to do something,” he says. “But these are research studies, not clinical studies, and, besides, you’re a graduate student, not a trained radiologist.” Gabrieli says he is moving towards a system where radiologists will systematically check all the scans, with permission to contact subjects and their physicians if something seems amiss.

Imaging capabilities don’t come cheap. One scanner can cost millions of dollars, and that’s not counting the infrastructure and staff needed to support it. But some basic-science departments are willing to pay the price for the chance, perhaps one day in the future, to get a look at the biological processes behind human consciousness.

Pat McCaffrey is a freelance writer in Auburndale, MA.