DYNAMIC
The Dutch National 14Tesla MRI Initiative in Medical Science
The Dutch National 14Tesla Initiative in Medical Science will establish the first MRI system at this field strength in the world. It will provide a national and international resource that will help cement the leading position of the Netherlands in ultra-high field imaging techniques and their application in Medicine and Neuroscience. The additional sensitivity afforded by the system combined with the improved ability to discern metabolite signals will offer scientists a powerful instrument for better characterization of a range of diseases and new insights into the workings of the brain.
Infrastructure and User Services
The main piece of equipment will be a 14 Tesla whole-body MRI system. This will be housed in a renovated building on the campus of RadboudUMC. This location provides ideal access for both patients and healthy volunteers. The building is accessible via the tunnel complex of RadboudUMC for patients and is close to the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (DCCN). The MRI scanner will initially be equipped with all hardware needed to record proton signals from the brain for both imaging (using the signal from water) and spectroscopy (the measurement of signals from metabolites). This includes the transmit/receive chain of electronics plus a specifically designed radio-frequency (RF) head coil. It will be possible to record the proton signal from other organs once suitable RF-coils have been developed. The system will also have the transmit/receive chain for nuclei other than protons installed so that users can develop their own RF-coils tailored to the needs of specific projects. The building will house a workshop suitable for the construction and testing of RF coils. IT infrastructure will enable the acquisition, storage and archiving of data according to FAIR principles. There will be access to the high performance computing infrastructure of DCCN and the ability to transfer patient data securely to all participating institutions.
DYNAMIC supports curiosity-driven and market-driven research. It will offer access to the scanner and workshops to users, and will provide support for data acquisition, and high level advice on scanning methodologies.
Examples/description of the type of research
The 14 Tesla MRI system can be considered a ‘mesocope’: a device capable of examining biologically relevant scales. We have identified three main target areas for research: neuroscience, brain disorders, and general medicine. In addition there are considerable technical challenges in terms of MRI hardware and methodology in moving to 14T.
For neuroscience a mesoscopic level of resolution will be crucially relevant for revealing the neuronal implementation of fundamental brain mechanisms, such as feedforward and feedback processing, which are at the basis of human cognition. 14T gives the possibility of entering a number of biologically separate spatial domains in the living human brain, which have only been accessible up to now in post-mortem samples or animal models. This will enable an integral view that links neuronal organization, activity, and metabolism, which is critically needed to advance our understanding of human brain function.
In brain disorders the ultrahigh spatial resolution will enable us to visualize fine-grained patterns of structural brain abnormalities, similar to microscopy, and relate these changes to molecular functional changes, while the significantly increased spectral resolution makes it possible to detect and measure individual molecules associated with pathological pathways.
In general medicine 14T whole body MRI system can provide detailed maps of many different morphological and functional contrasts with an unprecedented spatial resolution. Moreover, metabolic changes preceding functional and anatomical anomalies in disease development can be studied on a mesoscopic scale. The sensitivity of 14T will help visualize chemical processes in the micro-environment of for example cancer or inflammation.
How to access the infrastructure
We expect that almost all access will be physical in that all researchers will be present. However we will enable the technical possibility of remote access, so that it is possible to operate the scanner remotely, but patient/subject supervision would still have to be local.