Developpement of 3T MRI Protocol

Since January 2010, a new magnetic resonance imaging scanner (Philips 3T, Achieva) is installed on the Baudot Building in Toulouse hospital. This tool, is completely dedicated to the research. It was installed with sequences RMN supplied by the manufacturer.

Imagers also contain an instrumentation susceptible to evolution and/or to adjustment (antennas radio frequency, sheath of gradients, elements of physiological monitoring (for example control of the breath), regulation of the homogeneity of the magnetic field).

This MRI scanner and this instrumentation are used for anatomical examinations or for paradigms of cognitiveresearch (for example of detection of intellectual activations following simple stimuli of fingers movement, visual tasks, or of mental processes).

The developpement of this equipment is going to favor the emergence of numerous projects and new themes, up to there adressed by other techniques (psychophysics, EEG).

To obtain good quality signals and know the practical limits of this imager, it is thus necessary that the researchers doctors, physicists and engineers, can finalize on volunteers' significant number, all the sequences RMN necessary for the use of these tools for the research.

These developments are going to get organized around four main axes:

1 the control of the geometrical distortions (generated by the introduction of an object within the magnetic field) 2 Optimization of the parameters of sequences to improve the contrast and the spatial resolution of the obtained images 3 the development of new sequences 4 the feasibility study of the protocols of functional MRI