GRAND ROUNDS: "Fast MRI, Facebook, and the Future of Imaging"

About Daniel K. Sodickson, MD, PhD: Dr. Sodickson received a BS in Physics and a BA in Humanities from Yale College. At Yale, he was awarded both the Warren Memorial High Scholarship Prize (for the graduating senior majoring in a field of the humanities who ranks highest in scholarship) and the DeForest Pioneers Prize (for distinguished creative achievement in physics). He earned his PhD in Medical Physics from MIT and his MD from Harvard Medical School, both as a part of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Dr. Sodickson’s research aims at seeing what has previously been invisible, in order to improve human health. He is credited with founding the field of parallel imaging, in which distributed arrays of detectors are used to gather magnetic resonance images at previously inaccessible speeds. The advent of parallel MRI resulted in a burgeoning of research and commercial development in image reconstruction and radiofrequency coil array design. Parallel imaging hardware and software is now an integral part of MRI machines, and is used routinely in MRI scans worldwide. For his work in parallel MRI, Dr. Sodickson was awarded the Gold Medal of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) in 2006. He is also a Fellow of the ISMRM, and a Distinguished Investigator of the Academy of Radiology Research. He has a long history of service and leadership in the ISMRM, most recently serving as ISMRM president in 2017-2018. He has also chaired of the NIH Study Section on Biomedical Imaging Technology (BMIT-A). At NYU, Dr. Sodickson has led a transformation of the imaging research enterprise in the Department of Radiology at NYU Langone, bringing the Department’s national research ranking from #17 to #5, and earning the department’s Center for Advanced Imaging Innovation and Research (CAI2R) a designation as a national Biomedical Technology Resource Center. He leads a multidisciplinary team that aims to develop a new paradigm of rapid continuous comprehensive imaging, taking advantage of complementary tools in image acquisition and reconstruction, including parallel imaging, compressed sensing, and artificial intelligence. This work extends to multiple imaging modalities, including PET and CT as well as MRI, and involves stakeholders in basic imaging science, clinical science, and industry, who work together in tightly coordinated method development and clinical evaluation. Dr. Sodickson has mentored numerous students, fellows, and junior colleagues, and has devoted himself to developing a culture of collaborative innovation. Indeed, he has a strong interest in the dynamics of creativity and innovation, taking inspiration from diverse models from the Bohr Institute to Bell Laboratories and beyond, and he is currently in the process of launching a new institute for engineering in biomedicine – Tech4Health – building on those models. Tech4Health has a broad mandate to develop tools that solve key unsolved problems and unmet needs in the clinic and the lab, in the process bringing emerging technologies such as continuous sensing and artificial intelligence to biomedicine. Dr. Sodickson is convinced that the field of imaging in particular, and medical technology more generally, is at an extraordinary historical nexus, poised for imminent transformation, and he is committed to advancing and shaping that transformation.