High Performance Connectome Upgrade for Human 3T MR Scanner

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The aim of this proposal is to support a high performance upgrade for a Siemens Tim Trio scanner. The upgrade will greatly enhance ongoing NIH funded imaging research at the University of Minnesota, allowing investigators to fully utilize the advanced neuroimaging capabilities that are currently unavailable on standard 3 Tesla scanners, and, in particular, exploit the recently introduced advanced methodologies developed by the Human Connectome Project (HCP) teams at the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR) and at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). This upgrade will also enable CMRR to continue HCP type methodology development on the proposed platform and continue the support of numerous (currently over sixty and rapidly increasing) other sites throughout the world that rely on pulse sequence and image reconstruction software developed and distributed from CMRR using "customer to peer" transfer mechanism. The proposed upgrade is based on a new, recently announced, 3 Tesla scanner (the Prisma) by Siemens. Prisma was developed in response to the significant gains in neuroimaging demonstrated by the two HCP consortia the WU-Minn consortium led by Washington University and University of Minnesota (CMRR) and the MGH-UCLA consortium. The HCP developed methods running on the two special "Connectome" 3T scanners, has brought new and exciting capabilities critical for advancements in brain imaging, such as subsecond whole brain, high resolution resting state- and task-fMRI, and high resolution (~ 1mm isotropic) diffusion weighted MR imaging (dMRI) for tractography and for microstructure determination using extensive q-space sampling.