Equipment

fmri_250x180 The UVM MRI Center for Biomedical Imaging was established and supported in part by funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. Initial funding for the UVM MRI Center was received in 2006. The magnet was installed in April 2007 and operation began in July 2007. The federal grant was renewed in 2008 and again in 2010. In February 2009, the UVM MRI Center was selected by Philips for the first installation in North America of the Achieva 3.0T TX (multitransmit) magnet, one of four such magnets in the world at the time. The MRI Center is owned and operated by the University of Vermont for research purposes and is located in Fletcher Allen Health Care's McClure building and is utilized by a broad range of UVM/Fletcher Allen faculty and departments for both basic science and clinical research projects that focus on understanding more about disease and wellness, evaluating new treatments and therapies, and developing new techniques for diagnosis and treatment. More than 50 UVM research studies currently utilize the MRI Center for Biomedical Imaging.In addition to the standard MRI instrumentation, there are additional elements necessary to deliver experimental stimuli, acquire subject responses and functional images, store images, and provide initial image analysis capability. This instrumentation includes both hardware and software.

Analytical Workstations

We have multiple high performance (PC and Mac) analytical workstations for brain image processing, utilizing FSL and Brain Voyager for fMRI and structural analysis. We also have access to proprietary Phillips workstations for specialized applications.

Education

fMRI Study Group: This group consists of a weekly paper review/journal club format where new literature is reviewed by the participants and experimental proposals can be informally discussed.

fMRI Users Group: This group meets monthly and consists of active investigators utilizing the Brain Imaging Core resources. This meeting will offer opportunities for group consultation regarding experimental and technical problems in functional and structural brain imaging for individual investigators as well as involving individual investigators and COBRE trainees in decisions regarding Brain Imaging Core resources, strategic planning, and administrative issues.

Collaborations

The Vermont Advanced Computing Center (VACC) supports computationally-intensive research and high performance computing (HPC) services at the University of Vermont (UVM). The VACC is a university-wide Center, managed and coordinated with priority initiatives in the Office of the Vice President of Research. At the core of VACC is a 7.1 teraflop computing cluster -- an IBM e1350 known as the Vermont BlueMoon. The IBM Bluemoon cluster has 284 nodes providing 1420 compute cores connected to an IBM DS4800 providing 50 terabytes of raw storage. In collaboration with the BIP, the VACC has implemented cluster level computing for computationally intensive brain anatomical analyses including voxel-based morphometry (VBM) utilizing FSL and SPM and internal segmentation and parcelation of brain structures utilizing Freesurfer. Imaging data is moved smoothly from image storage servers from the hospital IT system (as well as the University system) to the BlueMoon cluster and back without firewall interference. This facilitates multi-subject analyses that would take weeks using single workstations to be completed in as little as a few hours.