Neurosalience #S2E13 with K. Kwong, R. Turner, and R. Menon - A deep history of fMRI

Functional MRI is a profoundly successful and powerful technique that so many of us use. It’s still developing and adding to our insight about the human brain. While MRI was developed in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, it would be another decade before it was realized that MRI could be used to detect and map, non-invasively, human brain activation. My guests today, Ken Kwong, Bob Turner, and Ravi Menon were the first who showed this capability. Ken’s successful experiment in early May of 1991 was arguably the first. Ravi, who was the key player in the Minnesota group, had produced solid fMRI results by the summer of 1991, and I had my first successful experiment in Sept of 1991. Bob Turner was a key player in his physiologic manipulation experiments in Cats. He collaborated with Ken, and also showed results of his own at 4T shortly after as well. We were all there at the Society for Magnetic Resonance Imaging Meeting in San Francisco in August of 1991 when Tom Brady (who headed MGH NMR Center at the time), first showed in his plenary lecture, the crude but stunning jaw dropping brain activation movies. The moment I saw that, I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my career. We have them all here to reflect on those heady days, what led up to their findings, and the bright future of fMRI.

Guests:

Ken Kwong has been conducting MRI research at the Mass General Hospital since the late 80’s when he pioneered diffusion imaging, as well as perfusion imaging approaches. He’s currently associate professor at the MGH Martinos Center.

Robert Turner trained with inventor of Echo Planar Imaging, Peter Mansfield, among others, and while working at the NIH, performed those first critical experiments, demonstrating BOLD contrast as well as obtaining some of the first results in humans at 4T using his home built gradient coil. One of Bob’s major contributions to the field was his early work in gradient coil design - which remains fundamental to what we do. From 2006 to 2014 he was the Director of the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and is currently retired and living in Cambridge, England.

Ravi Menon was a post doc at Minnesota and a driving force in the effort to produce functional images using a highly challenging non-EPI approach at 4T. He has been a steady contributor to fMRI methods ever since and is currently a Robarts Scientist and Canada Research Chair in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Co-Scientific Director of BrainsCAN which is Canada First Research Excellence Fund, Scientific Director, Centre for Functional and Metabolic Mapping, and Professor of Medical Biophysics, Medical Imaging & Psychiatry at The University of Western Ontario