By bringing together these scanners, the research expertise in Cambridge, and the latest in ‘big data’ informatics, we will be able to do sophisticated analyses that could revolutionise our understanding of the brain – and how mental health disorders and dementias arise – as well of cancers and how we treat them.
- Ed Bullmore
The equipment, funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK, sits within the newly-refurbished Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre (WBIC), which today celebrates two decades at the forefront of medical imaging.
At the heart of the refurbishment are three cutting-edge scanners, of which only a very small handful exist at institutions outside Cambridge – and no institution other than the University of Cambridge has all three. These are:
- a Siemens 7T Terra Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner, which will allow researchers to see detail in the brain as tiny as a grain of sand
- a GE Healthcare PET/MR scanner that will enable researchers to collect critical data to help understand how cancers grow, spread and respond to treatment, and how dementia progresses
- a GE Healthcare hyperpolarizer that enables researchers to study real-time metabolism of cancers and other body tissues, including whether a cancer therapy is effective or not
These scanners, together with refurbished PRISMA and Skyra 3T MRI scanners at the WBIC and at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, will make the Cambridge Biomedical Campus the best-equipped medical imaging centre in Europe.
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Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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