[BRAD SUTTON] Hello, I'm Brad Sutton. I'm a professor in bioengineering but I'm also technical
director of the Biomedical Imaging Center. And I'm going to show you one of our two 3T Prisma
systems that we use for a lot of our human subject research, animal imaging, or even other sample
imaging. So come on in! So this is one of our two state-of-the-art 3T Prisma systems. We have two of
those here in the Biomedical Imaging Center inside the basement in Beckman Institute. So 3T Prisma
80 ml tesla per meter gradient amplitudes and 64-channel receivers on both systems.
The 64-channel head coil has lots of individual receiver elements to be able to pick up on signals
associated with different parts of your brain. This is a multi-nuclear system. So in addition to
just protons for imaging, we can do other nuclei too. And so we have things like phosphorus
coils which are loop coils which let us see 31p in the scanner instead of just protons.
We have carbon 13 coils which are also loop coils that we can use.
This is another 31p coil. So phosphorus imaging again, why might you want to see phosphorus? Well
phosphorus is involved in ATP, which is the main unit of energy in the body, and so that's a really
important signal to get. You can also see things like pH so you could see the acidity of different
tissues. We also have sodium, 23Na. Sodium is really important for neural tissues. You have
sodium and potassium are the two uh chemicals that really create the uh the membrane potentials and
so sodium is really important. And then we also have other coils that can accommodate a variety
of other things. So this right here, is a small animal coil. So you can put a small animal in here
and you can still, even though it's a really large bore MRI system, you can image things fairly small
such as a rat, a mouse or an octopus. One example of things that we've done here over a long time is
exercise studies in older adults. So we take older adults who are relatively sedentary
and we put them on aerobic fitness program. And in just as little as a couple of months,
we can actually see changes in the structure of their brain that come from that improved
health and cardiovascular fitness and that lets their brain work better. We can give them tests,
they do better on the test and we can see their brain and see the representation in their brain
about the structures that actually change to support that. In addition, we have a couple of
unique acquisitions that I wanted to tell you about that are very unique to the Biomedical
Imaging Center here that we're applying in a wide range of circumstances. The first of those
is magnetic resonance elastography. What we do is we put a little vibration pad behind the head,
we gently vibrate the head, and we watch to see how the brain tissue moves and we can estimate
the stiffness of the tissue. We show sort of the general process here where we have
we have a resounded device and we have a pillow placed behind the head and we can acquire really
high-resolution brain images. So what's unique to here is we have a very customized 3D multiband
sequence that we use that has some spiral acquisition that gives us a really good signal
and noise ratio to provide high resolution, high signal noise ratio for being able to get really
good high quality mechanically mechanical property maps of the brain. And so one of the exciting
results we've had is in healthy college-age kids, we're able to find a measure, which is the damping
ratio of the hippocampus, that correlates with their memory performance with a really high
correlation coefficient. We're explaining about 50 percent of the variance on their performance
so we're really excited by that. The other acquisition that we have here that's unique to
here uh is a spectroscopic imaging acquisition and this is the work of professor Liang in electrical
and computer engineering department. And uh what he has done is he has developed a sequence
that can provide 3D high-resolution chemical information about the brain so you can see many
of the metabolites that are active. And so we show an example of that here. We can take the brain,
we can break it up into lots of different chemicals. Each one of these spectra give us
information about the different chemicals that are present so we can pull one out. We pulled out NAA,
which is a marker of healthy brain tissue, but we can make a map for about nine or ten different
chemicals in the brain associated with that. What makes it unique here is we can get all of this
in addition to myelin information, resting state functional connectivity, lipid content all in
under 10 minutes with a 3D scan of the brain at about two to three millimeter spatial resolution.
And as you can see too, we have a lot of space in this room in order to do experiments. So
we have people doing EEG electrodes, eye tracking, functional MRI paradigms
and then we're even having new users coming from say aerospace engineering
to do fluid flows and the like. So lots of flexible space in order to be able to do