MR Research
Director: John Oshinski, PhD
Medical Physics & Quantitative Imaging
Director: Open Position
Nuclear Cardiology R & D
Director: Ernest Garcia, PhD
Physics and Computing
Director: John Votaw, PhD
Radiopharmaceutical Discovery
Director: Mark Goodman, PhD
Radioligand and Expert System
Director: Andrew Taylor, MD
The MR/PET has completed its final design stage and relocated from the Siemens factory to the Center for Systems Imaging (CSI) at the Wesley Woods campus. This unique arrangement is one of only two US trial sites. The unit has the capacity for complementary, simultaneous functional brain imaging. This device promises to allow the evaluation of living human neural processing not previously possible.
Emory took possession, at the beginning of September, of the PET head insert that is the final component of a combined MR/PET scanner. This scanner is one of only four in the world. It is a state-of-the-art prototype device that arose from collaboration among: Universitat Tubingen, The Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine in Juelich Germany, the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Emory, and Siemens. The PET head is a self-contained PET scanner that fits inside the tunnel of a standard 3T clinical MRI scanner. Great effort had to be expended to develop electronics that can operate in the high magnetic field environment. The picture above shows the scanner now at the second floor of the Wesley Woods campus of the Center for Systems Imaging (CSI).
This scanner is capable of simultaneously collecting PET and MRI images. This is as opposed, for example, to a PET/CT scanner where the CT is collected and then the bed moves and the PET is collected. The first and obvious advantage is convenience for both the patient and investigators - not only in time savings, but in having registered images for easy fusion and interpretation. This might be particularly important for patients who are cognitively impaired or who have Alzheimer's disease and cannot tolerate being in scanners for a long time.
The second advantage is that it is known that the neural state of the patient is the same during both acquisitions. It will be known that the functional information from the MR and the functional information from the PET are separate realizations of the same underlying neural processing. It is hoped that this will lead to more sensitive studies of neurophysiology.
MR and PET scientists at CSI will be exploring the limits of this new device in the months to come. They have plans to use the total information collected to improve the images from each modality. It is quite possible that the images derived from the combined device will be superior to ones collected from stand-alone scanners. For more information, please contact Orman Simpson [(404) 712-1024] at the Center for Systems Imaging.