3 Tesla Magnetic Resonance Imaging Scanner (3T MRI Scanner)

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This application for a new 3 Tesla MRI scanner is part of the establishment of a Campus for Mental Health (CMH) located at the Valley Medical Campus (“Klinikum Tal”) of the University Clinic Tübingen (UKT). The aim of the CMH is to create tight interconnections both at clinical and neuroscientific level between all departments working in the field of mental health.The new CMH research scanner will provide the necessary expansion of clinical research imaging capacities at the Valley Medical Campus (“Klinikum Tal”), while quality standards and safety regulations will be provided by the Imaging Science Centre (ISC). The new scanner will be structurally assigned to the Department of Psychiatry and managed in cooperation with the Department of Radiology and the ISC. The major goals of the installation of a new MRI scanner at the CMH is to i) enable the planned clinical imaging research at the CMH (Medical Faculty and UKT) and the adjacent Departments of Clinical Psychology and Biological Psychology (Faculty of Sciences), ii) compensate for existing new scan time requirements based on internal development of existing departments and iii) respond to the requests for scanning facilities emerging due to appointment of new professors (e.g. Neurotechnology and Computational Psychiatry, Tobias Kaufmann). Thus, timely establishment of one research dedicated MR scanning facility at the CMH is strongly needed. A central strength of the CMH research environment is the concentration of a critical mass of MR-centered expertise on different aspects of application of MR imaging techniques, such as Social Cognition (see Center Initiative 1: Birgit Derntl, Thomas Ethofer, Benjamin Kreifelts, Marina Pavlova, Peter Dayan), Brain stimulation (see Center Initiative 2: Christian Plewnia, Surjo Soekadar, Alireza Gharabaghi, Ulf Ziemann/Christoph Zrenner), Nutrition and the Brain (see Center Initiative 3: Hubert Preissl, Jennifer Svaldi, Katrin Giel, Manfred Hallschmidt, Nils Kroemer), Developmental Disorders (see Center Initiative 4: Andreas Fallgatter, Ann-Christin Ehlis, Tobias Renner, Dirk Wildgruber), Mechanisms of Cognition (see Center Initiative 5: Steffen Gais, Andreas Bartels, Axel Lindner, Karsten Rauss, Kou Murayama) and dementia research (see Center Initiative 6: Christoph Laske, Gerhard Eschweiler, Tobias Lindig).This physical concentration shall further enable large-scale patient measurements for new local DFG funded collaborative research centers and multicenter participations. Applicants of this proposal have successfully applied to participate in 6 of 9 BMBF-funded research networks in psychiatry, psychotherapy and psychology and provision of necessary imaging facilities with suitable scanners is a prerequisite for these ongoing and the subsequent long term imaging initiatives.