The Kirby Center occupies over five thousand square feet of space at the ground level of Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute's 707 N. Broadway Building, plus another 4200 square feet in the adjacent 716 N. Broadway Building, where the 7T MRI is housed. The Center's primary resources are three Philips MRI scanners: dStream Achieva 3.0T TX, dStream Ingenia Elition 3T and Achieva 7T. The maximum gradient strength is 8 G/cm on Achieva 3T, and 4.2 G/cm on the Elition and 7 Tesla. Coils include 32-channel head coils, 8-channel knee coil (also used for neonate brain MRI), flexible surface coils and others. The scanners can perform all modern imaging technologies, including echo-planar (EPI), fast spin echo, navigator echoes, simultaneous multi-slice, compressed sense, single-voxel MR spectroscopy (MRS) and multi-slice spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) approaches. All machines are equipped with parallel imaging capabilities (SENSE imaging), which reduces artifacts in the multi-readout sequences (e.g. EPI-type) used for fast imaging. Through a research agreement with Philps Healthcare, we have access to the development environments for MR pulse sequence and reconstructor programming.

Our high-field preclinical and molecular magnetic resonance facility houses two ultra high field MRI scanners, a Bruker BioSpec 11.7T and a Bruker 17.6 microimaging system. These scanners are equipped with state-of-the-art multi-channel RF coils and MRI cryoprobes, allowing high-resolution in vivo rodent imaging for application in life science, biomedical, and preclinical research. A Caliper IVIS Spectrum is also available - an integrated platform that combines optical imaging including Spectral Unmixing, 2D and 3D quantitative bioluminescence and fluorescence with low dose and ultrafast microCT imaging. The facility has a surgical suite for performing preparation procedures for in vivo imaging studies. Expert faculty and comprehensive imaging support services include help with experimental design and performance, and pulse sequence development for innovative MRI imaging, processing, and data interpretation.