This Shared Instrumentation Grant requests funds to support the purchase of a 4.0 Tesla magnetic resonance scanner to be located within the McLean Hospital Brain Imaging Center. McLean Hospital is the largest Harvard-affiliated psychiatric teaching hospital and supports one of the most comprehensive neuroscience research programs in the country. With the installation of a 1.5 Tesla magnetic resonance scanner in 1987, McLean became the first psychiatry facility in the world to independently own and operate a Brain Imaging Center (BIC). The BIC research program currently includes seven independent faculty members who are involved in collaborative studies with additional investigators both at McLean and at several local institutions, including research programs at other hospitals and universities. Major research interests of BIC scientists include studies of schizophrenia, affective illness, dementia, substance abuse, aging, linguistics, and technology development. The primary imaging methods which are employed by BIC investigators are magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain. As both MRS and fMRI results improve with increasing field strength, the research efforts of the BIC would be dramatically enhanced for all investigators with the addition of a 4.0 Tesla scanner.
