A New Magnetic Resonance Imaging Console for the 7 Tesla Small Bore Animal Imaging Facility

向BBSRC提出的建议是使用新设备，以便能够拍摄完整的生物标本，从分离的器官（包括人类心脏组织）到活的动物。我们将使用的技术是磁共振成像（MRI），这是一种非破坏性的方法，可以在不使用有害辐射的情况下，从活体体内拍摄清晰度和细节的图像。MRI在医院被广泛用于对病人进行成像，我们建议购买类似的设备来对更小的对象进行成像，比如大鼠和小鼠。MRI的优点之一是它是一种非常通用的技术，可以以多种不同的方式使用/在这个提议中，我们包括三种不同的大脑研究：一种是我们寻找大脑中对调节食欲很重要的区域；另一个我们感兴趣的是改变精神状态的药物是如何起作用的；第三，我们希望了解炎症（身体对感染或过敏作出反应的过程）如何影响大脑。我们的研究并不局限于大脑/我们还将使用成像来了解心脏的详细结构，发现导致新血管形成的机制，最后通过成像，在死后，不同哺乳动物物种的一些标本的头部（包括保存在博物馆的一些有价值的样本），我们希望提高我们对哺乳动物如何移动和保持平衡的理解。该技术的多功能性意味着它可以用来帮助提供生物学中大量科学问题的答案，通过这次购买，我们将能够为当地研究人员提供机会，在未来几年内进行最先进的成像研究。

This proposal to BBSRC is for new equipment to enable images to be taken of intact biological specimens ranging from isolated organs (including human heart tissue) through to living animals. The technology we will use is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is a non-destructive method to take images of superb clarity and detail from within living subjects without using harmful radiation. MRI is widely used for imaging patients in hospitals, and we are proposing to purchase similar equipment for imaging much smaller subjects, such as rats and mice. One of the advantages of MRI is that it is a very versatile technique which can be used in a number of different ways / in this proposal we include three different studies of the brain: one in which we look for regions of the brain which are important in regulating appetite; another in which we are interested in where drugs which alter states of mind act; and a third in which we wish to understand how inflammation (the process by which the body responds to an infection or allergy) affects the brain. We are not restricting our study to the brain / we will also use imaging to find out about detailed structure of the heart, to discover mechanisms which lead to the formation of new blood vessels, and finally by imaging, after death, the heads of a number of specimens of different mammalian species (including some valuable samples stored in museums) we hope to improve our understanding of how mammals move and maintain their balance. The versatility of the technique means that it can be used to help provide answers to a large range of scientific questions in biology, and by this purchase we will be able to provide the opportunity to local researchers to undertake state-of-the-art imaging studies for several years to come.