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Mission & Research Focus

    

The mission of the Small Animal Imaging Center at CTI focuses on providing a state of the art infrastructure for development and implementation of advanced imaging experiments.  It is accessible to Northwestern Research Community and also available to outside private and academic institutions.

RESEARCH FOCUS

The imaging facility currently is used by groups who focus on the following general areas:

1) Oncological Imaging
2) Cardiac Imaging
3) Neurological Imaging

Imaging methods and techniques available at the Facility  allow detection of both morphological, functional and metabolical changes in tissue environments in a broad range of different animal models:

– High resolution imaging of soft tissue (liver, colon, pancreas) (MRI)
– High resolution quantitative imaging of brain anatomy (MRI)
– Imaging metabolism (PET, MRI)
– Imaging bone structure (CT)
– Imaging lung morphology and function (MRI, CT and PET)
– Imaging of biological processes using targeted  contrast agents (MRI, PET, CT)
– Quantitative imaging of tumor micro-environment following therapy (MRI, PET, CT)
– MR imaging guided interventional procedures in cancer
In vivo tracking of labeled cells (MRI, PET, CT)
Ex vivo labeled cell imaging (MRI)
– Quantitative tumor vascular imaging using dynamic contrast enhanced methods (MRI, CT, PET)
– Functional brain imaging of conscious and unconscious rodents using BOLD, IRON (MRI, PET)
– Functional cardiac imaging (MRI, CT, PET)
– Perfusion imaging (MRI, CT)
– Angiographic imaging (MRI, CT)
– Magnetic resonance spectroscopy of in vivo metabolites (MRI)
– Muscle skeletal imaging (MRI, CT, PET)
– Spinal cord imaging (CT, MRI)
– Ultra high resolution ex vivo microscopy (MRI)