The purpose of this shared instrumentation grant application is to acquire an Imacon 200 ultra high-speed imaging system to be shared by a group of NIH funded investigators at Duke University. The Major Users Group is supported by 7 R01 and 1 P01 grants from 3 different NIH institutes. These investigators (from the Depts. of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Urologic Surgery, Cell Biology, Radiation Oncology, and Biomedical Engineering) have critical needs for high-speed imaging analyses in order to effectively advance their research. The projects that will immediately benefit from this proposed instrument cover a wide range of topics, from shock wave lithotripsy (SWL) for the treatment of kidney stone disease, to wound healing in SWL, to the design of liposomal drug carriers, to regulation of germ line stem cell division in Drosophila, to gene therapy for cancer treatment. The Imacon 200 offers a unique high-speed imaging system utilizing multiples of intensified CCD modules to provide simultaneous framing and streak recording, up to 16 frames of high-resolution images in each sequence. Each intensified CCD module can be gated electronically with an exposure time from 100 ms down to 5 ns, thus providing an effective framing rate from 10 frames/second to 200 million frames/second. The operation of the Imacon 200 system is controlled remotely via fiber optical link by a dedicated computer for reliable image capture and quantitative data extraction. No comparable equipment capable of performing any of these functions currently exists at Duke University. This system, therefore, is critical for performing high-speed photoelastic and shadowgraph imaging to better understand shock wave-stone interaction, intraluminal bubble dynamics in blood vessels, the role of bubble collapse and associated microstreaming in triggered release of liposomal carriers, microjet-faciliated gene delivery to Drosophila embryos, hyperthermia-mediated gene delivery and activation, DNA transport across the plasma and nuclei membranes of the cells during electroporation, and rheology of red blood cells in tumor microcirculation. The establishment of a core facility in ultra high-speed imaging will greatly enhance these research programs and the scientific contributions by these and other investigators at Duke University.
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