Norwegian 7T MR Center is a National infrastructure for neuroscience research. The mission is to provide the Norwegian community of neuroscientists the very best tools for high resolution structure-function mapping of the brain.
7 Tesla Magnetic-Resonance (MR) will help to translate knowledge from model preparations in animals to the normal and pathological human brain. While studies of the human brain cannot currently match the spatial and temporal resolution obtained in animal preparations, a clinical 7T MR scanner will, with new technology for reduction of distortions and artefacts, allow us to image the human brain at a very high resolution. This radical improvement in resolution will pave the way for human studies of computation in subareas, layers and columns, which are much closer to the actual computational units of the brain than the global areas accessible with 3T scanners. The anticipated convergence of structural resolution in animal and human studies is likely to link concepts and hypotheses in the two research communities. This is for example critical for studies of entorhinal cortex, which is generally the first brain region to show degeneration in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We envisage that high-resolution studies of structure, white matter connectivity and grey matter activity patterns on 7T MR scans can be used for subclinical diagnosis and monitoring of disease progression.
The installed MR-system, a Siemens MAGNETOM Terra System, is equipped with:
- Dual Mode (Clinical and Research).
- 8 Channel RF-transmit chain in research mode
- 80/200 Gradient System.
- 32RX/1TX head coil (clinical mode)
- 32RX/8TX head coil (research mode only)
- 28RX/1TX knee coil (clinical mode)
- 13C and 31P loop coils
- Multinuclear option
- fMRI equipment
Photo: Siemens Healthineers.
