Wayne State University was recently awarded a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health that will be used toward purchasing a 3T PRISMA scanner for neuroscience research. Wayne State’s Office of the Vice President for Research and School of Medicine will match an additional $1.2 million to purchase the equipment.

The instrument is a modern 3T human magnetic resonance imaging system that has an ultra-strong body gradient system that will dramatically improve the spatial and temporal resolution of the MR imaging critical for advancing the science in detecting finer anatomical structures and enhancing tissue characterization of the brain’s microstructure.

“Over the past three decades, Wayne State’s community of MR imaging researchers has contributed important medical imaging technology breakthroughs, including MR sequence design and software development that has been adopted around the world,” said Timothy Stemmler, Ph.D., interim vice president for Research at Wayne State. “Our researchers are studying the microvasculature of grey and white matter tissue in neurological conditions and disorders like multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, as well as other important research areas such as the impact of stress, trauma and substance use on brain function. These and other research studies will greatly benefit from the investment in the new 3T PRISMA MRI and its state-of-the-art features.”

The new system offers significant hardware and software upgrades that will provide new sequences, fast imaging methods and a variety of technical imaging advances that were not available on the university’s VERIO scanner. The new 3T PRISMA will provide an ultra-high spatial resolution quantitative imaging, high-spatial resolution, and high temporal and spatial resolution for function MRI.

The new system will have an immediate impact on more than 18 research programs at Wayne State University, ultimately enabling new discoveries into brain structure and function to help better understand the workings of the brain and etiology of disease.
 
This National Institutes of Health award is administered by the Office of the Director at NIH. The grant number is S10 OD028724-01.