Facilities, equipment, and other resources

Biomechanics Research Lab (220 Jolley Hall)

The lab consists of 650 square feet of enclosed laboratory space on the second floor of Jolley Hall in the Engineering School complex. The lab is equipped with a variety of transducers and test equipment including: acceleration, force and displacement transducers and associated signal conditioning equipment; three PC-based data acquisition and signal analysis sub-systems (SigLab, Spectral Dynamics).

 The lab includes five networked Pentium desktop PCs and three Pentium notebook computers and a 64-bit, dual-processor computational server (8Gb RAM, 200 Gb disk, Xi Computer). The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering maintains a network of PCs for general use (computer-aided design, word processing, e.g.) as well as email and Web servers.

 Biomedical MR Laboratory (BMRL, East Building, Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology)

The laboratory facilities include a 200 sq. ft. wet chemistry lab with a standard fume hood, a 200 sq. ft. animal procedure room equipped with operating light and table, two Harvard apparatus rodent ventilators, a Harvard model 201 infusion pump, a Kopf sterotaxic apparatus, and two operating microscopes, and a 200 sq. ft. electronic room equipped with network analyzer, soldering stations, band saw, drill press, etc. for RF antenna design and fabrication.

 Several Sun Microsystems Ultra-60 workstations are available for data processing. Multiple IMB/Wintel and Macintosh computers all on the network are also available to the proposed work. Software available includes: Varian spectroscopy and imaging analysis software, Matlab, and diffusion tensor analysis software developed in-house.

Magnetic Resonance Scanners

There are 3 Siemens clinical-scale MR systems dedicated to research; all are in the East Building on the School of Medicine campus. These include 1.5-T Vision and 1.5-T Symphony whole body magnets and a 3.0-T Allegra and 3.0-T Trio systems (Siemens UBMed, Erlangen, Germany). The Symphony MR system is equipped with the Sonata gradient system (40 mT/meter; 200 msec rise time), and phased-array surface coils.  This scanner has a fiberoptic MR-compatible hemodynamic monitoring system (InVivo Research, Inc., Orlando, FL) that provides signals on ECG, respiration, heart rate, pulse oximetry, blood pressure and CO₂.   The scanner also has an MR-compatible power injector (Integris, Medrad, Inc., Indianola, PA). The Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology holds a research agreement with Siemens for the Symphony MR system and, thus, the most recent hardware and software up-grades are available.  The Mallinckrodt Institute also holds a maintenance contract with Siemens for all MR systems.

 Four (one 11.7 T and three 4.7 T) state-of-the-art Varian (Palo Alto, CA) INOVA small animal imaging systems are also available. The 11.7T and two 4.7T systems are in the East Building; one 4.7T system is installed in the Physics/Engineering complex on the Danforth Campus. Each system is interfaced with high performance Magnex (Oxford, UK) magnetic field gradient systems. The actively shielded gradient coils possess clear-bore inner diameters ranging from 8 to 16 cm (maximum gradient strengths of 100 to 30 G/cm, respectively), with rise times of 300 microseconds. Each system is controlled by its own Ultra 60 workstation with 20 Gb of temporary data storage disk for data acquisition. Systems are on the network for the ease of data transports.