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FIP Seminar: Revolutionary MRI resolution
Wednesday, November 1, 2023 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Wilkinson Building, room 021 auditorium
Presenter
Dr. G. Allan Johnson, Charles E. Putman University Distinguished Professor of Radiology, Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Physics, Duke University
Over the four decades, Johnson, his engineering graduate students and his many collaborators at Duke and afar refined many elements that, when all combined, made the revolutionary MRI resolution possible. Some of the key ingredients include an incredibly powerful magnet (most clinical MRIs rely on a 1.5 to 3 Tesla magnet; Johnson's team uses a 9.4 Tesla magnet), a special set of gradient coils that are 100 times stronger than those in a clinical MRI and help generate the brain image, and a high-performance computer equivalent to nearly 800 laptops all cranking away to image one brain. animated .gif shows colorful brain circuitry at very high resolution while scanning up and down in transverse planes of the mouse brain. This video shows horizontal 'slices' of the circuitry data moving up and down across the brain. After Johnson and his team "scan the daylights out of it," they send off the tissue to be imaged using a different technique called light sheet microscopy. This complementary technique gives them the ability to label specific groups of cells across the brain, such as dopamine-issuing cells to watch the progression of Parkinson's disease.
Contact
Burns, August
660-5598
august.burns@duke.edu