Bruker announced today that it has successfully installed its BioSpec® 170/25 system at the CEA NeuroSpin research center near Paris, France (www.meteoreservice.com/neurospin). The world's first horizontal ultra-high magnetic field 17.2 Tesla MRI system features a magnet bore diameter of 25 cm. It is equipped with a novel Bruker BGA-S™ gradient system with unsurpassed amplitude and slew rate specifications for cutting-edge preclinical in vivo imaging on small animals. These magnet and gradient innovations overcome current limits, and enable new MRI techniques for preclinical research, such as molecular imaging at a microscopic scale, or functional and connectivity neuroimaging at higher spatial resolution. The translation of this preclinical MRI research to clinical applications may have important benefits for human healthcare, to better understand, diagnose or manage neurological and psychiatric disorders.
“This unique instrument will give us, for the first time, access to the working of the whole brain at the cellular level, an important step to understand the Neural Code”
The unique BioSpec®170/25 horizontal MRI magnet is based on Bruker's UltraStabilized™ sub-cooling technology. Adapted from Bruker's successful ultra-high field NMR magnets, this technology now also enables ultra-high fields for MRI applications with excellent homogeneity and stability. Its dedicated shim and gradient system with a large bore for animal positioning and with unique gradient amplitudes of up to 1,000 mT/m and slew rates of up to 9,000 T/m•s will enhance strong diffusion contrast and overcome susceptibility distortions at this high field strength. Bruker's well-known MRI software ParaVision® includes the latest animal imaging methods for morphology, cardiology, spectroscopy and fMRI. Together with Bruker's latest spectrometer generation Avance™ III, the system also allows real time control and parallel imaging using multiple receivers for higher temporal resolution.
"This unique instrument will give us, for the first time, access to the working of the whole brain at the cellular level, an important step to understand the Neural Code," stated Professor Denis Le Bihan, Director of NeuroSpin in Saclay.
The BioSpec®170/25 MRI system at NeuroSpin is one of a series of milestones in cutting-edge, world class research in France that is supported by Bruker's pioneering magnetic resonance systems. Bruker recently received an order from the CRMN (www.ens-lyon.fr/crmn), the CNRS/ENS-Lyon high-field NMR Research Center in Lyon, France, for two ultra-high field 800 MHz NMR systems, which will enhance NMR studies of large biomolecules and of metabolomics.
Professor Lyndon Emsley, the Scientific Director of the NMR Laboratory, commented: "These new 800 MHz systems will clearly allow us at the CRMN Lyon to significantly improve our capacity for innovative science."
Scientific boundaries will also be expanded by the first 263 GHz solid-state DNP-NMR system in France, with an increase in sensitivity by more than a factor of 50x, enabling entirely new solid-state applications for NMR research. Bruker received a recent order from the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) in Grenoble to enhance the scientific capabilities of the NMR center at the Minatec Center of Excellence in micro- and nanotechnologies (www.minatec.com). Researchers expect to utilize this groundbreaking technology to study materials simply not observable before with solid-state NMR, thereby opening up even more new areas of research.
According to Dr. Gaël De Paëpe, DNP Project Manager: "The acquisition by Minatec of a NMR spectrometer coupled to Dynamic Nuclear Polarization will significantly reduce the intrinsic sensitivity problems of classical NMR, and enable exploration of numerous, innovative nanomaterials at the core of the development in nanosciences."
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