John Bellieveau Records the First Magnetic Resonance Images of Human Brain Function

In August 1991 John (Jack) Belliveau, a scientist at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, presented the first unambiguous images of human brain activity changes observed with magnetic resonance (MR) at the 10th annual meeting of the Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine in San Francisco. "Using dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC) MRI with a gadolinium-based Gd-DPTA contrast agent, Belliveau mapped the changes in cerebral blood volume (CBV) following neural activation in a subject responding to a simple visual stimulus."

On November 1, 1991, the paper "Functional mapping of the human visual cortex by magnetic resonance imaging," by Dr. Belliveau and colleagues appeared in Science, 254, No. 5032, 716-9. On the cover of the issue was an artist's rendering of an image showing a human head, seen from behind, with a disc of the skull removed, the exposed visual cortex registering a squiggle of activity.