The young applicant, Shelton Caruthers, "had a skill set that we didn't see here often at Philips. I'm sure that had to do with his training, although [at the time] I wasn't aware of it being biomedical engineering," Giordano says. "The skill set he brought to Philips is the kind of thing we are looking for in the future."

Giordano says Caruthers had a "very thorough analytical background, but is able to relate it to the human condition in the hospital. He has a personality and way of solving problems that are first class."

Caruthers, who is now 32, may have paved the way for the three other biomedical engineers subsequently hired by the department. Smiling, he recalls his interview with Giordano: "I think I had to tell him what a biomedical engineer was."

As a clinical scientist for Philips, Caruthers evaluates the performance of the company's new magnetic resonance imaging machines and works with physicists, doctors and other engineers to develop refinements and new applications for them. He is currently assigned to the company's newest MRI machine, the Gyroscan Intera. The first of these in the United States is being tested at Boston Medical Center.

The Gyroscan Intera is one of the fastest MRI machines in a U.S. hospital, able to reconstruct 196 images per second, twice as fast as conventional machines and three times the rate of a television picture. The machine extends the range of possibility for interactive scanning and may open the door to entirely new applications. These would be developed with guidance from doctors who tell Caruthers what they want to do with the machine. He designs a way to accomplish what the doctors want and then trains technicians in the new procedure. He also gives feedback to company physicists headquartered in the Netherlands, who use the information to make design modifications. Caruthers also collaborates with neuroscientists in original research at Boston Medical Center.

"In everything I do, I act as liaison with physicians, engineers, doctors, technicians, scientists and between scientists and other scientists," Caruthers says. "Any engineer can learn the nomenclature, but I already understand what's going on, for example, in a neuron impulse."

Caruthers has always been interested in the mix of engineering, physics and medicine. It was during a three-month internship between his junior and senior years at the Mayo Foundation in Rochester that Caruthers concluded that "medical imaging was the future."

Caruthers received his bachelor's degree in biomedical engineering, magna cum laude, from Louisiana Tech University in 1989; his master's, cum laude, in biomedical engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1993; and his doctorate, cum laude, in biomedical engineering from Vanderbilt in 1996. He is also an assistant professor in the Department of Radiology at Boston Medical Center.