The purpose of this application is to seek funding for purchasing the 3T Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner, which is currently installed at the MR Research Center, Department of Radiology, UNC-Chapel Hill. This MR scanner is currently on loan to UNC through a research agreement between the Department of Radiology and Siemens Medical Systems, Inc for a span of 18 months. At the end of the 18 months, UNC-Chapel Hill will need to come up with funding to purchase this system, or this system will go back to Siemens. Unlike routinely utilized clinical scanners, this 3T system has a field strength that is as twice large as the clinical scanners. The increased field strength offers several important advantages over the clinical scanners. First, signal-to-noise ratio is anticipated to increase linearly with field strengths, making it possible to acquire very high-resolution anatomical images without affecting the SNR. This is likely to have profound implications for depicting small brain lesions as well as further facilitate tissue segmentation. Second, the sensitivity of revealing blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) contrast is expected to increase. BOLD contrast is the underlying mechanism(s) that has been widely utilized for obtaining brain functional information, also known as fMRI. Recently, extensive efforts have been devoted to employ fMRl for the investigation of how the brain works as well as to probe how cognitive dysfunction occurs in patients with psychiatric disorders. The presence of the 3T scanner at UNC-Chapel Hill is likely to facilitate biomedical research on campus. Finally, one of the major strengths at UNC-Chapel Hill is animal research with the trans-genetically manipulated mouse models. In the past, an extensive amount of animals needed to be sacrificed for histological analysis. The presence of the 3T scanner will provide investigators a non-invasive tool to gain insight of the morphologic and/or patho-physiologic alterations associated with the trans-genetically manipulated animals without sacrificing them. Overall, the presence of the 3T MR scanner is likely to have profound implications for biomedical research at UNC-Chapel Hill.
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