The BioSpec 70/30 MRI scanner is a multipurpose system for high-resolution MR spectroscopy and imaging. It operates at 7 Tesla, and has a warm bore diameter of 30 cm. The system is equipped with a 12 cm gradient and shim coil set, capable of generating maximum gradient amplitude of 400 mT/m and 4-channel receiver for multi-coil operation.
The center has two 72 mm 1H quadrature volume transmit-receive coils(rat), one 72 mm 1H linear volume transmit-receive coils(rat), one 35mm 1H quadrature volume transmit-receive coils(mouse), and 2 surface coils for rat scanning and one surface coil for mouse scanning.
The operating console has Paravision 5.0 (to be upgraded to 5.1), which features the following: Built-in parallel acquisition; Push-button GRAPPA reconstruction; EPI, navigator techniques for motion reduction; Ultra-short TE acquisition; Half-Fourier encoding; Self-gated IntraGate; Real-time display of acquired and reconstructed data; Sophisticated data archiving including DICOM export; Enhanced 2D and 3D data visualization.
The instrument is ideal for the following purposes: 2D and/or 3D high-resolution anatomical imaging; Diffusion and diffusion tensor imaging; Flow imaging; Cardiac imaging; Dynamic contrast imaging; Functional MRI, chemical shift imaging and localized spectroscopy.
Small animal MRI-compatible monitoring and gating system (Model 1025) is from Small Animal Instruments (Stony Brook, NY, USA). It allows monitoring core temperature, ECG, breathing frequency, blood oxygen level and pulse rate.
