Month: July 2023

Why Do We Make Everyone Change into Scrubs for Their MRI?

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We get it; it can be annoying and time consuming to have a participant change out of their clothes into our scrubs when there is no apparent metal on their clothing, but looks can be deceiving. In honor of MRI Safety Week, I am sharing an article written in The Washington Post by Tobias Gilk that discusses the hidden MRI dangers in today’s clothing.

Another reason we have everyone change their clothing (including clinical patients) is to maintain the cleanliness of the scanner and homogeneity of of the magnetic field, as well as reduce artifacts caused by items introduced into the bore. I can confidently say from experience, a dry cleaning tag staple creates a huge artifact and is incredibly difficult to locate.

If you ever have a question about MRI Safety, please email Elisa. Also, mrisafety.com, created by Dr. Frank Shellock, has a searchable list of everything from implants to hardware that is kept very up-to-date, and is a great resource for other safety questions as well.

Farewell to Dr. Roeland Hancock

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Associate Director of BIRC and Psychological Sciences faculty Roeland Hancock has accepted the position of Director of the new Imaging Center at Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute.

Roeland came to UConn in 2017 after completing his postdoctoral fellowship. His accomplishments are numerous. He started the IBRAiN program, created the TMS training protocol and offered training in TMS and EEG, and taught the only course on neuroimaging methods on campus. Roeland led a team of IBRAiN students to co-author a Nature paper. Numerous graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and faculty benefited from his support, including 14 dissertations. During his tenure, BIRC has not only contributed to grow and strengthen our scientific community, but also contributed to increasing the revenue of BIRC by 10x (of which research-related expenditure grew by 5x also), becoming the first service center to “break even” at UConn despite the pandemic and shut down. Needless to say, it is a huge loss to our psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience communities.

Roeland’s last day was June 23rd.