Ferenc A. Jolesz

Jolesz became director of the Division of Magnetic Resonance Imaging at The Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 1988, and in 1989, associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. In 1993, he established the Image-Guided Therapy Program at The Brigham and Women’s Hospital to advance the use of imaging for enhancing minimally invasive surgical procedures and other means of therapy delivery. The program includes the Surgical Planning Laboratory, the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Laboratory, and intraoperative imaging suites. In 1998, Jolesz was appointed the first incumbent B. Leonard Holman Chair in Radiology at Harvard Medical School, and in 2000, was appointed Vice Chair for Research for the Department of Radiology at The Brigham and Women’s Hospital. In 2001, he was named director of the Advanced Imaging Center of Harvard Medical School’s NeuroDiscovery Center.

The broad focus of Jolesz’s research was the integration of imaging technologies into a variety of medical disciplines beyond the traditional role of Radiology. He drew from the areas of basic and clinical neuroscience, imaging physics, MRI, three-dimensional medical visualization, robotics, computer vision, and therapy delivery technologies to pioneer a wide variety of clinical techniques in image-guided therapy. He cultivated basic research in each of these areas and integrated the results with the goal of augmenting the physician’s ability to deliver treatment to his or her patient.

Where they did not previously exist, Jolesz spearheaded the development and implementation of highly novel approaches to image processing and analysis, visualization, and navigation techniques for improving the diagnosis and treatment of neurologic and oncologic diseases. He then combined the most promising results into research clinical systems where new procedures could be developed, evaluated and refined.

Jolesz initiated and led an academic industrial partnership of clinical and technical colleagues in designing and developing the first magnetic resonance image-guided unit for image-guided brain tumor resection that was installed at The Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 1993.

The team, consisting of members of the departments of Radiology and Otorhinolaryngology and the neurosurgical service at BWH and industrial collaborators from General Electric Medical Systems, developed and built an entire operating suite built around a specially-designed 0.5 Tesla MRI scanner that allowed ongoing patient scans to be obtained during a surgical procedure. Information from the scans, including imaging data registered with three-dimensional models created from pre-operative imaging, was available to the surgical team to help guide the procedure.^[4] The system became known as MRT (for Magnetic Resonance Therapy) at BWH and commercialized by GE Medical Systems as the GE Signa SP.