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 MR Microscope is a unique system designed for the very highest spatial resolution. An 89 mm bore 9.4T Oxford magnet has been configured with a custom gradient from Resonance Research Inc. This bespoke set of coils provides gradients up to 3000 mT/m, which has enabled us to acquire diffusion tensor images of the postmortem mouse brain at 15 µm isotropic resolution (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218617120). The voxels in these images are 2.37 million times smaller than a standard clinical DTI scan. The system is controlled by an MR Solutions console with a completely rebuilt software stack. A new operating system and pulse sequence environment has been created to provide automated, accelerated, routine diffusion tensor imaging for studies in neuroscience.
Agilent 7T Console
Color track density video from the Duke Mouse Brain Atlas traveling from the olfactory bulb to the brain stem. Colored tracks are created using a super resolution method the extends the spatial resolution to 5 µm.
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
