Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre

Nottingham has considerable expertise and a long track record of success in the development of MRI. It also has strong research programmes in gastroenterology, liver disease, metabolism, sports medicine, orthopaedics, respiratory medicine, mental health, hearing and radiological sciences. This proposal aims to combine these strengths to establish a world-leading centre, the SPMIC, to drive the development and application of medical imaging. A key feature is that the centre will be set up to share our facilities and expertise, as well as the data that we acquire, with other centres. We are requesting funding for a number of items of equipment which will transform our current facilities: 1. We were the first group in the UK to install and develop a 7T MR scanner, which is the highest field MR scanner generally available worldwide. Ultra-high field MR considerably increases the sensitivity of MRI and MRS, and our work and that of others has proven the capabilities of 7T MR in the brain. There is now another 7T scanner in Oxford, and we are pleased to note that other UK groups are recognizing the advantages of 7T and are applying for such scanners through this call. We are happy to share the experience gained in pioneering MR studies at 7T. We now need to add whole body capability to our 7T scanner, to exploit the capabilities of 7T outside of the brain. We are ideally placed to do this because of our experience in using MR in experimental studies. 2. We have a long track record of using MR to study nutrition, metabolism and gastrointestinal disorders. However we are currently limited by the fact that many subjects in these studies are too large to fit into a standard MR scanner, limiting the study of obese patients. We also have considerable experience of studying the effects of exercise on the physiology and metabolism of skeletal muscle and the brain. We need to use the non-invasive capabilities of MR in this work, but are hampered by the problems involved in scanning subjects undertaking exercise. We have an exercise bike designed for use inside an MR scanner, but this is difficult to use in a conventional scanner because of the narrow bore. We have therefore requested funding for wide-bore 3T MR. 3. We have developed strong technical expertise relating to two recently-developed methods for increasing the sensitivity of MR: hyperpolarized (HP) inert gases (e.g. xenon and krypton) and dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP). Both of these techniques have the potential to produce a step change in the way MR is used clinically. We will exploit the increased sensitivity of HP inert gases in the study of lung disease and will also undertake completely novel studies that involve using DNP to study metabolism in muscles and in the brain. 4. We have made lots of progress in understanding the brain's function by using electrophysiology techniques (MEG and EEG). We will build on this by installing "real time" capability on our MEG scanner, which will allow us to perform experiments where we stimulate a subject based on their ongoing brain state. 5. As part of our hearing research, we want to study brain activation in patients who have received a cochlear implant, but MEG and MRI cannot be used for these experiments. We will therefore purchase fNIRS equipment to monitor how these patients adapt to their implants. We will site this equipment in a specially-designed room adjacent to our MR scanners, to ensure that the new facilities are as convenient as possible for patients who take part in multi-modal studies. 6. Patients often do not like having MRI scans, and one of the main reasons is acoustic noise. We will use active noise cancellation headphones to reduce the noise levels in our MR scanners. We will also install systems to detect and correct for head motion in MRI; this will greatly improve the quality of images obtained from patients who often find it hard to keep still; invaluable for clinical studies of patient