Wednesday, January 15, 2025
1/15/2025
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT This proposal is a request for a 3 Tesla, whole-body, wide-bore magnetic resonance imaging system for the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus School of Medicine. The proposed instrument, a 3T GE SIGNA Premier XT, would fulfill unmet research needs while providing greater scientific and funding opportunities for investigators across a wide range of departments and institutions. Major research interests of our investigators include understanding the neurobiology of obesity and food intake behaviors, substance use disorders, psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders, and fetal exposures to stress or environmental factors, as well as non-neuronal mechanisms of metabolic disorders and kidney function. In the context of our expanding research enterprise, our current scanner is oversubscribed, leading to a need for additional scanning capacity. Additionally, the increased capabilities of the proposed scanner, which include substantially improved gradient performance compared to our current Siemens 3T MRI scanner, would be highly beneficial, as it would allow improved image quality (higher signal-to-noise, reduced distortion and artifacts in many types of scans) and enable performance levels compatible with current standards of large-scale neuroimaging consortiums. Importantly, this improved gradient performance can be achieved in a wide-bore system, a feature that remains critical for our investigators, given the large number of studies focused on obesity and related disorders. The requested scanner is also quieter, with reduced vibrations. This would benefit all studies, as it improves participant comfort and compliance. This is especially useful for studies focused on psychiatric disorders, in which our investigators often assess auditory processing, which is limited by the loud noise generated by our current scanner. Quieter scanning would also benefit research investigating neurodevelopment in infants, who have to be able to sleep during scanning. Higher acceleration factors on the new scanner would allow for shorter overall exam times, additionally increasing the likelihood of scan completion in infant and pediatric populations. These factors would also result in less geometric distortion and signal dropout in many of the brain regions studied by our investigators. Multiple other benefits of the proposed system, including enhanced overall homogeneity, more receiver coils, better analog-to-digital converters, improved reconstruction, including the capability to run Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence-based reconstruction, improved processing speed, and the availability of AIRTM coils will also yield myriad improvements in data quality, participant comfort, and compliance. These upgrades will improve our investigators’ ability to innovate, collaborate, and make important contributions to science.
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