OVERVIEW

History

In 1999 Thanassis and Marina Martinos of Athens, Greece, presented a gift of $20 million to the Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Division of Health Sciences & Technology (HST) to honor the memory of their daughter Athinoula. The purpose of the gift was the establishment of a biomedical imaging center dedicated to fostering research that would span disciplines from the basic biosciences to clinical investigation to the development and medical application of new technologies.

HST invited the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to participate in founding the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, and a partnership was formed. This partnership united the clinical and imaging expertise and extensive imaging facilities of the existing MGH Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Center with HST's strengths in engineering and basic neuroscience and the resources represented by the Martinos family gift. Hence, the Martinos Center was launched in 2000 under the Directorship of Bruce R. Rosen, MD, PhD, with a faculty of approximately forty investigators and over $23 million in existing biomedical imaging equipment. The Center is located on the MGH research campus in the Charlestown Navy Yard with a satellite facility on the MIT campus.

Research and Technology Development

The Martinos Center's dual mission includes translational research and technology development. The core technologies being developed and used at the Center are magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and spectroscopy (MRS), magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalograpy (EEG), near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and diffuse optical tomography (DOT), Positron emission tomography (PET), electrophysiology, molecular imaging, and computational image analysis. A particular area of innovation at the Center is Multimodal Functional Neuroimaging, which involves the integration of imaging technologies. We are also world leaders in the development of primate neuroimaging techniques. Major areas of research at the Center include: psychiatric, neurologic and neurovascular disorders; basic and cognitive neuroscience; cardiovascular disease; cancer; and more. With an extensive and expanding inventory of state-of-the-art imaging facilities, a world-class team of investigators and collaborators, and important government, industry and private supporters, the Martinos Center is leading the way to new advances and applications in biomedical imaging.

Leadership

The Martinos Center’s founding Director is Bruce R. Rosen, MD, PhD. Ram Sasisekharan is the MIT Director, and David Cohen is the HMS Director. A Scientific Management Committee assists the Leadership in providing strategic direction for the Center. The Core Management Committee provides guidance for the operation and allocation of Center facilities and resources.

Faculty

The Martinos Center is home to about 120 faculty members and over 100 postdoctoral research fellows and graduate students, and is a resource to hundreds of researchers and students throughout Boston, the United States and the world. Our research faculty are basic scientists and clinicians interested in a broad range of biologically and medically important questions. They work in conjunction with our physical scientists and engineers to develop new imaging technologies and research applications, and to bring these developments to the sphere of medical care. The Center includes investigators and their laboratories based at the MGH research campus in Charlestown, as well as numerous other researchers from various departments within MGH, and other local, national and international institutions (see Center Affiliates). Most Martinos Center-based faculty members have primary appointments in Radiology at MGH, some with secondary appointments at MIT. Several of our investigators from other MGH departments and other institutions work here at the Center, while even more conduct long- and short-term imaging studies at the Center and maintain their base elsewhere. Scientific investigation and technology development is funded through government, industry and other research grants.

Cores

The backbone of the Martinos Center is the Imaging and Computational Core Resources.  The Imaging Core includes an extensive and expanding inventory of state-of-the-art MR, MEG, Optical Imaging and PET Imaging facilities and equipment, including related laboratories and testing rooms. The Computational Core oversees data processing, computational infrastructure, software and hardware issues.  Together the Imaging and Computational cores develop and provide state-of-the art biomedical imaging and image processing technology and techniques to the Center's research faculty and user community. The Core resources are fully supported by user fees drawn from research grants, instrumentation grants and industry agreements. Our core facilities are available for use to all qualified investigators from academic, medical, government and industry labs. While our mission primarily involves research and development, we also provide a clinical MEG service to the hospital (MGH).  We do not offer a clinical MRI service.

Infrastructure

Center Administration provides the infrastructure that supports most Center activities, including grants and financial administration, orchestration of events and educational endeavors, Center and Core operations, and internal and external relations. Indirect costs do not support this infrastructure. The Center's research, development and teaching efforts are funded via a variety of government, industry and private sources, ranging from training grants to individual investigator awards to major programs and initiatives.

Schematic of Martinos Center Organization and Support Structure