Upgrade of vertical 11.7T MR scanner

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

We propose to upgrade a vertical 11.7T MR scanner (Bruker, Advance III) in the NMR Service Center of Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine. The upgrade is necessary because, after 13 years of heavy use from the last upgrade, the scanner starts to experience failures of multiple components. In the past 12 months alone, the system failed 11 times, each time requiring service visits of Bruker engineers, losing a total of more than 3 months of scanning time. As a consequence, we experienced significant drop of productivity of the scanner in the past two years. This vertical MR scanner is truly versatile and unique, attracting many NIH- funded research projects from and outside Johns Hopkins University. To sustain this highly successful program, we would like to seek for the SIG funding. The upgrade will also provide new hardware components and operating software, which is highly important to enhance the efficiency and quality of ongoing and new research projects. Probably the most significant upgrade is the increase of the bandwidth by a factor of 8 (125KHz to 1GHz), which allows us to acquire eight times more gradient echoes within the same amount of acquisition time. This directly translates to faster imaging acquisition for those studies in which phase-encoding is the rate-limiting step. Upgrade of the current operating software, Paravision 5, to version 6 will also provide significant enhancement of the user interface. This upgrade will allow us to continue to serve the research communities in JHU and nearby institutes. The past and current unique studies performed with this scanner include microimaging of tissues from mice, rats, primates, and human, perfusion systems of cells, tissues, and organs, in vivo imaging of mouse brains, spectroscopy of cell and tissue extracts, and phantoms studies for pulse designs. The center has more than 25 years of history as a service center, which has been supported almost entirely by users with NIH funding. With the SIG funding, we will extend our service for a coming decade.