Installation of Preclinical MRI

The Preclinical MR Imaging scanner is a state-of-the-art magnetic resonance (MR) imaging scanner specially designed for small animal imaging and heteronuclear spectroscopy research. The Facility represents a joint venture between RPCI and SUNY at Buffalo. It was installed in January 2000 and is fully operational. Multi-disciplinary collaborative investigations with RPCI/SUNY at Buffalo and other area researchers are under development, which will utilize the non-invasive, non-destructive nature of the modality for in vivo diagnosis, characterization, monitoring of therapy and subsequent follow-up studies to answer questions related to cancer including both morphologic and physiologic characterization. While our initial focus will be on longitudinal investigations of small animal models of disease, additional studies are also planned for solid state characterization of medical implants, flow in porous media, and other basic science questions related to non-invasive characterization of samples. Several image analysis programs and customized algorithms for post acquisition processing will be available to researchers for analyzing and visualizing their data.