New MRI electrifies research

Posted 12/18/00

Editor's note: This story first appeared in the December, 2000 issue of Dartmouth Life

Tell most people you are getting an MRI and they are likely to be concerned. Say that to a Dartmouth student, and the response is likely to be, "Cool, I got one too!"

Last November the psychological and brain sciences department took delivery of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, making Dartmouth the first liberal arts school in the country to own and operate one strictly for research purposes. Nestled in the basement of newly opened Moore Hall, "The Magnet," as it's affectionately known, has since involved faculty, undergraduate and graduate students in cutting-edge research.

Here's how the machine works: As a patient lies in the hollow central canal of the MRI, the machine uses magnetic pulses to take two-second snapshots of the brain's electrical activity. These pulses do not present any risk to humans unless they have pacemakers. These functional MRIs, known as fMRIs, give scientists impressions of the brain's activity as the patient is asked to perform a task, such as viewing pictures on a screen or learning words in a new language. When the fMRI data are run through computer analysis, certain parts of the brain may "light up," showing not only how people react to a condition but what part of the brain causes the response.

With The Magnet running almost around the clock, professors and students simply book MRI time on a sign-up sheet. "That experience would be almost unheard of at other universities," says professor George Wolford.

"At many universities it can cost $800 to run one fMRI subject. If you're spending $10,000 for a project, you don't let undergrads play around. You don't repeat studies to check for accuracy," he says. "We have the ability to do both."

As the professors use The Magnet in their research, they are also incorporating it into their teaching. Next term, professor Suheil Inati will teach a course specifically on using the MRI for research, a class that the department hopes will lead to student-run studies and theses.

"The Magnet has created a new level of intellectual ferment," says Deputy Provost Jamshed Bharucha, who has been using the MRI to research how the brain recognizes music. "It has become a magnet for recruiting faculty, obtaining research grants and getting students excited. It has found its way into the curriculum and sparked people's imaginations about new ways of studying the mind."

Neha Shroff '02, a Presidential Scholar research assistant, has been working with professor Michael Gazzaniga '61 and post-doctoral research fellow Todd Handy on a study about visual imagery and its relation to memory, a topic she may develop into a senior thesis.

"All I did was blitz Dr. Handy and ask to get involved," says Shroff. "Since neither of us had done a magnet study before, we sat down and learned together how to operate The Magnet and analyze the data. He explained to me, aside from plugging in numbers and pressing buttons, what the computer is actually doing."

The department recently added five new faculty members, and the MRI has a great deal to do with who they hired. "With the new building, The Magnet and the commitment of Dartmouth to the department, we've had experts coming out of the woodwork saying, 'You don't happen to have a position, do you?' " says Wolford.

Professor Scott Grafton joined the faculty last January to serve as director of the Dartmouth Brain Imaging Center. "We're seeing a real cultural change about how this research is done," says Grafton, who has a unique background combining neurology, brain imaging and nuclear medicine. "Now that there's total access to this equipment, it will make the field advance more quickly. There are almost 40 active projects going on right now, and we've only been operational since March."

Another major player joined the department by coincidence. "An MRI needs a physicist to work out the magnet sequences," says Gazzaniga, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Just as The Magnet arrived, Gazzaniga was approached by Suhil Anati, an MRI physicist from MIT, who came to Hanover when his fiancée matriculated to the Dartmouth Medical School.

Gazzaniga himself is a great asset to the department. Editor-in-chief of the biggest journal in the field, Gazzaniga coined the phrase "cognitive neuroscience" when he co-founded the field in the early 1980s. He is spearheading the creation of the National FMRI Data Center, an Internet-based archive of fMRI data from all over the world.

With magnet research booming, brains are quite literally in demand. The student body has yielded a majority of the test subjects. What's in it for them? Every subject leaves with a glossy photo of his or her brain.