Kenneth Kwong
| Kwong, Kenneth | |
|---|---|
| Born |
28 March 1948 Hong Kong |
| Residence | Boston, Massachusetts |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater |
University of California, Berkeley University of California, Riverside |
| Known for | fMRI |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Magnetic Resonance |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
Kenneth Kin Man Kwong is an American scientist born in Hong Kong. He is a pioneer in human brain imaging. He received his bachelor's degree in Political Science in 1972 from the University of California, Berkeley. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Riverside studying photon-photon collision interactions. In 1985 he worked as a nuclear medicine physicist at the VA hospital in Loma Linda, California, establishing his work in medical science. After one year he was invited to a research fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in the field of PET (positron emission tomography) imaging. Following his work in PET, he began his involvement in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Upon joining the team at the MGH Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (MGH-NMR) Center, Kwong pursued an interest in perfusion (the distribution of blood an nutrients to tissue) and diffusion (the detection of random dispersion of particles, principally water) in living tissues. Together with MIT graduate student Daisy Chien, and colleagues Richard Buxton, Tom Brady and Bruce Rosen he was one of the earliest entrants in the field of brain diffusion imaging, which itself was opened by the pioneering experiments of Denis Le Bihan. In a conference paper in 1988 at the Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine the MGH group was the first to demonstrate diffusion anisotropy in the human brain, stating, "... we observed different diffusion patterns parallel and perpendicular to the midline of the brain, which was repeatable, and depended only on the direction of diffusion encoding gradient relative to the brain, regardless of which physical gradient was used.". This anisotropy itself is the fundamental principle underlying the modern method of MRI tractography and structural connectomics (the in vivo visualization the axonal fibers that connect neurons in the brain) . Chien and Kwong then used their early diffusion techniques to study human patients with stroke. In technically demanding circumstances (a low field MRI using conventional imaging, located in a parking lot trailer nearby the MGH) they were the first to demonstrate in human subjects the early drop in diffusivity seen in acute infarction in cats by Moseley.
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