Bruker Biospec 117/16 Ultra Shielded Refrigerated (USR) system is the first horizontal MRI system at 11.7 Tesla field strength. It delivers unsurpassed signal-to-noise ratio and resolution comparing to lower field small animal MRI systems. The bore size of the magnet is 155 mm, which provide easy access for imaging of rats and mouse. The drift rate for this magnet is 0.05 ppm/hr, and the homogeneity of the field is < 2 ppm for dsv 30 mm. The magnet is equipped with a two-stage Cryo-refrigerator (9 kW) which eliminates the need for liquid nitrogen and prolongs the liquid helium holding time. A Motorised Animal Positioning System is available on this scanner, designed to simplify animal handling and to increase animal throughput. Surface coils and head coils that are mounted onto the animal bed are also available with the system. Water beds are integrated in the animal beds to maintain body temperature during anesthesia. Laser crosshairs provide precise positioning of the region of interest. Repositioning accuracy is better than 1 mm.
The new integrated shim and actively shielded gradient system, B-GA 9S, provides extra high-order shim control Z3 and Z4.
Gradient specifications:
- Outer/inner diameter: 152 mm / 90 mm
- Gradient strength: 740 mT/m
- x, y, and z-linearity 60 mm dsv: < 5%
- Linear inductive rise time (x,y,z): 100 micro-second
- Slew rate: 6,600 T/m/s
The AVANCE III console provides highest speed RF generation and data acquisition with a highly modular and scalable transmitter and receiver channel architecture. Eight transmitters and eight receivers are available for this MRI scanner. Each receiver provides gating and power for the use of an external preamplifier. The system contains two 1H preamplifiers, one for high power and one for low power RF thresholds, and one preamplifier for X-nuclei.
Softwares
- The ParaVision 5.1 software package enables acquisition and reconstruction of data sets employing standard MRI techniques as well as user-defined MRI schemes.
- The ParaVision Spectroscopy Package consisting of TOPSPIN 2.0 for NMR data acquisition, processing, plotting, analysis and simulation as well as MRS techniques, such as localized single voxel spectroscopy and Spectroscopic imaging (CSI).
- DTI Evaluation Tools can perform calculation of tensor components and scalar invariants (tensor trace, anisotropy index); The DTI Visualization Tools is able to display maps of tensor components , scalar invariants and diffusion direction.
