The University of Virginia (UVa) has built a strong program around magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of small animals over the past thirty years. Many NIH funded investigators at UVa utilize MRI as part of their projects and are dependent on the measurements that can be noninvasively made in intact rodents. We currently have a Siemens/Bruker ClinScan 7T MRI that supports a large number of NIH funded projects. The ClinScan was purchased in 2007 with funds from a NIH High-End Instrumentation grant. We chose the ClinScan because it had the same pulse programming platform as the Siemens clinical MRI scanners; The clinical MRIs at UVa are Siemens and we have a great deal of expertise in creating pulse sequences for the Syngo platform. However, it was announced in 2016 that Siemens and Bruker were ending this partnership. Our ClinScan is running Siemens VB17 which is the latest version for the ClinScan but an outdated version on the clinical scanners. There will be no further upgrades to the software and support for this system. Parts and technical expertise (which have been provided by Bruker) will steadily wane. This puts the associated NIH funded projects at great risk. We plan to move to the Bruker platform which is the only remaining manufacturer of high performance high-field MRI systems. Funds are requested to purchase a Bruker BioSpec 94/20 9.4T horizontal-bore NMR system for rodent imaging and spectroscopy. This system comes equipped with high performance gradients, broadband and multichannel radiofrequency (RF) transmit and receive capabilities, physiological monitoring and triggering, and a wide range of standard pulse sequences and the ability to write pulse programs in-house. This new high-field, high-performance system will allow us to make additional measurements that are not feasible with the lower performing 7T ClinScan and will replace an aging 12-year-old system on its last legs with a more reliable MR imaging/spectroscopy system. If/when we receive notification of funding for the new scanner, we will undergo operational and programming training on the Bruker ParaVision platform. We will re-write all the existing sequences we have developed in-house and test them at a Bruker site. By the time the new system is installed, we plan to have our existing sequences ported to the new platform. The higher performance of the 9.4T will permit us to address biomedical questions that are not feasible with the 7T system due to the higher static field strength, better signal/noise, stronger/faster magnetic field gradients, and enhanced RF technology of the proposed MRI.
The University of Virginia has a highly-utilized, small-animal Bruker/Siemens ClinScan 7T MRI scanner that is no longer manufactured. Partial funds are requested to replace this dead-end product with much more capable Bruker 9.4T MRI system that will support a large number of NIH funded investigators.
