On the outside, it looks like every other brain scanner — a hollow metal cylinder with a hard, retractable cot. On the inside, however, the Connectome scanner boasts the most advanced brain imaging technology in the world. Installed at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in September 2011, this magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner is poised to be the Hubble Space Telescope of neuroscience.
The scanner, built as part of an $8.5 million federal grant, features a gradient field that is eight times more powerful than a conventional MRI machine. It produces images that are four to eight times more detailed, and does so in one-sixth of the time. The scanner, quiet enough for a baby to sleep inside, relies on a new brain-imaging technique called diffusion MRI, which maps long-distance white matter connections in the brain by tracking the movement of water.
