Equipment
Imaging tools available to projects within the DIIL program are listed below.
7.0 T MR Histology
The horizontal bore Agilent MRI system is large enough to accommodate specimens up to 70x120 mm. Using compressed sensing enables us to image these large specimens at very high spatial resolution (< 50 um). The resulting image arrays can be up to 1 TB (See Big Data Initiative).
Agilent 7T
3D rendering of a rat brain with directionally colored tractography of the bilateral corticospinal tracts.
Courtesy Evan Calabrese, Md, PhD
3D rendering of a rhesus macaque brain with directionally colored tractography of the bilateral corticospinal tracts.
Courtesy Evan Calabrese, Md, PhD
3D rendering of a human brainstem with directionally colored tractography of the bilateral corticospinal tracts.
Courtesy Evan Calabrese, Md, PhD
9.4 T MR Mouse Connectome Scanner
The vertical bore 9.4T Agilent MRI has been specially constructed for the microscopic imaging of fixed specimens (Johnson, G A et al Neuroimage 37(1) :82-89, 2007, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.05.013). A bespoke gradient system, one of only two such systems in the world, provides encoding gradients up to 2500 mT/m, more than 50 times that of a clinical MRI. The system has been tightly integrated to a high performance cluster computer to enable compressed sensing (Wang, N et al, Brain Structure Function, 2018 (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-018-1750-x) for quantitative connectomic studies of the mouse brain (Johnson, GA et al, Journal of Comparative Neurology, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.24560).
Agilent 7T Console
DWI (left) and color FA (right) from a whole mouse brain quantitative connectome @ 25 um isotropic resolution. The volume resolution is 512,000 times smaller than a routine clinical DTI
MR Histology of a whole mouse provides complete coverage @ 31 um spatial resolution. The resulting 8 GB array is 200 times larger than a routine clinical body MRI
