Facilities & Capabilities

Philips MR7700 in the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health

Our scanner is a newly updated Philips MR7700 3.0 Tesla MRI scanner for MR imaging and spectroscopy. This is the first MR7700 to come to Canada featuring these advanced capabilities:

  • Brain imaging on the MR7700 with the 32 channel head coil yields twice the signal to noise ratio than what we obtained with the 8 channel head coil on the Achieva.
  • We have access to three approaches to speed up imaging on the MR7700:
    • Parallel Imaging (SENSE),
    • Compressed Sense which can speed up image acquisitions by up to 50% with minimal effect of SNR,
    • Multiband Excitation for 2D acquisitions, like DTI and EPI (for fMRI), can be sped up by a factor of 2 to 3.
  • Combining the increased SNR with the faster scanning capability, for many MR sequences the MR7700 provides us with higher resolution images in substantially shorter time.
  • Diffusion imaging with significantly improved data quality with diffusion gradients reaching up to 65 mT/m and 220 T/m/s.
  • Newly installed multi-nuclear spectrometer, enabling researchers to explore beyond the proton (1H):
    • Sodium (23Na) MRI is used to assess brain cell and cartilage health,
    • Phosphorus (31P) MR spectroscopy is applied to understand cellular energy dynamics in a variety of anatomies.
  • The MR7700 body coil contains two radio frequency transmitters which provide more uniform RF coverage.
  • We have every coil that Philips produces including: 32 Channel Head, Head neck with two anterior sections, posterior spine in scan table, T/R head, Torso, Wrist array, Small extremity, Foot ankle array, T/R Knee array, Small and large microscope coils, Endo-Rectal, and 2 each of Flex-S, Flex-M and Flex-L coils.
  • RAPID Biomedical Intervential Head Coil: 8 channel head coil designed to accommodate transcranial magnetic stimulation with MRI.
  • RAPID Biomedical dual-tuned head transmit-receive single channel coils: 1H/23Na and 1H/31P.
  • We also have the capability to do liver elastography (RESOUNDANT),
  • We also have the ability to run interleaved TMS/fMRI. This is an emergent technique that combines transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) stimulation inside the MR scanner while a blood-oxygen-level dependent BOLD T2* sequence is being acquired.This approach enables the examination of the effects of TMS stimulation on the human brain in vivo and in real-time. If you are interested in this technique please contact Dr. Fidel Vila-Rodriguez.
  • The MRI Suite has an attractive multi-colour LED lighting arrangement and a SensaVue LCD monitor is available at the rear of the magnet bore for fMRI presentations. There is also a large LCD screen at the rear of the room which can show themed displays to aid in relaxing the subject.
  • Considerable effort was made to suppress acoustic noise from the MR7700 MR Scanner- as a result, it is not possible to hear the MR from the outside the Imaging Centre.