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In the early 1990s, Harvard radiologist Dr. Ferenc Jolesz devised a clever way for killing brain tumors with a laser. But he ran into a hard obstacle: the skull.
Jolesz wanted to send a laser beam along a fiber optic strand inserted through a hole in the patient’s cranium. The beam’s intense heat would destroy the target. But he couldn’t see where the beam was going. “It was like trying to evaporate an apple seed inside a whole apple without cutting it,” Jolesz says. “If you don’t deliver enough heat, you will only dent the seed. If you deliver too much, you’ll make a big hole in the apple.”
Jolesz thought magnetic resonance imaging could help. The right MRI machine would allow doctors to see inside the body, monitor temperature changes inside the skull, and perform surgery at the same time.
One problem: a machine like this did not exist. Then as now, most MRI machines enclosed the patient in a tunnel at the center of the magnet. This design made brain surgery impossible.
But a GE executive who knew about Jolesz’s project introduced him to Trifon Laskaris, a medical imaging pioneer working at GE’s research labs in upstate New York. Laskaris listened to Jolesz and came back with a design that sliced the multi-ton MRI magnet in half. The redesigned machine looked like a double donut with enough space between the two rings to give the surgeon access to the patient. “We could image the patient and operate at the same time,” Jolesz says. “Not only laser procedures could be done, but all types of open surgeries.”
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The first MRI-guided procedure was a biopsy that took place in 1994. Today, Laskaris’ design “is still the best configuration” for magnetic resonance imaging during surgery, Jolesz says. Doctors at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital have used it for more than 3,500 surgeries, including 1,400 craniotomies, brain biopsies and other neurosurgery procedures.
Laskaris received a dozen patents for his work on the double donut machine. He holds more than 200 U.S. patents, a feat matched only by a handful of GE inventors. “Trifon’s work speaks for itself,” says Mark Little, who runs GE Global Research. “Without his decades of dedicated research into superconducting magnets, MRI technology would not be where it is today, a mainstay of hospitals around the world.”
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Trifon Laskaris redesigned the MRI machine and opened the way for MRI-guided brain surgery.
Laskaris says that he liked playing with gadgets since he was a small boy growing up in Athens, Greece. “My father was a high school teacher and my mother was a seamstress,” he says. “One day, her sewing machine broke down. I was just six years old, but I connected the pulleys, installed the little motor and put in the switches.”
Laskaris studied engineering at the National University of Athens, andcame to the U.S. and GE in 1966. “At the time there was a big U.S. space program and many American engineers were going to NASA,” Laskaris says. “That drained a lot of talent from the industry.”
At GE, Laskaris started developing software simulating cooling flows inside massive power generators for nuclear power plants. But he quickly moved to GE Global Research and started working on magnets and superconductivity, a physical phenomenon that drops electrical resistance to zero in extremely cold metals. “When you power up a supercooled magnet, it can produce the same magnetic field for a thousand years with no more power required. You can do so many cool things with it,” he laughs.
In 1983, when a team of GE engineers developed the world’s first full-body MRI, Laskaris helped design the machine’s 1.5 tesla magnet. “We started by imaging grapefruits,” he says. The magnet has since become the industry standard. There are some 22,000 1.5 tesla MRI machines working around the world, generating 9,000 medical images every hour, or 80 million scans per year.
But Laskaris, now 70 years old, is pushing on. Liquid helium used to cool down the magnets is becoming scarce and his team is working on designs that need just a fraction of the fluid. The first GE MRI machine 30 years ago used 5,000 liters of helium. His latest design in development is projected to need no more than ten.