On a chilly October 27th morning, a rivetted audience – consisting of a rigging crew, security guards, curious onlookers, and scientists and engineers from the Magnetic Resonance Research Center (MRRC) – witnessed a delicate dance of a gigantic crane lifting a 9-ton magnet off a flatbed truck, and then hovering over 60 feet into the air to clear city wires and artwork at the rear of The Anlyan Center (TAC) building. The new 11.7T magnet, with a bore size of 16 centimeters, adds to the MRRC’s arsenal of seven other horizontal-bore magnets with varying sizes and fields to conduct state-of-the-art imaging of anatomical, metabolic, and physiological processes in health and disease across a wide range species, including humans.
After the magnet was successfully lowered into the MRRC entrance at the rear of the north TAC building, the rigging crew inched the magnet down a maze of corridors into a purposely designed room. “The process of positioning the magnet – hoisting, dangling, shifting – had to be accurate within a few millimeters,” said Professor Douglas Rothman [GRD ’87], jointly appointed in YSM and SEAS, and MRRC co-director. Due to restrictions of walls and ceilings already present, this meticulous task was achieved very slowly with an age-old technology consisting of an assortment of wedges, blocks, levers, tackles, ropes, and skates!
“On morning of November 20th this new magnet will be brought to life,” said Terry Nixon, Director of MRRC Instrumentation and Facilities. It will be judiciously ramped up to its designated field of 11.7 Tesla, which is 234,000 times stronger than the earth’s magnetic field. On morning of November 22nd, the magnet went straight to field the first time. The raw magnet is well within specification, which is excellent news.
Like other MRRC magnets, this state-of-the-art magnet is also superconducting, which is made from coils of wire composed of a superconducting material consisting of niobium-titanium, niobium-tin, and rare-earth barium/copper oxide materials. These wires conduct electricity with zero resistance when cooled to temperature of 4° Kelvin above absolute zero, thereby enabling the generation of a strong magnetic field. This state-of-the-art system from Bruker uses a nitrogen-free ultra-shielded and helium refrigerated superconducting magnet, allowing it to be essentially free of helium boil off.
Both magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) – powerful clinical and research tools – rely on the quantum phenomenon of nuclear magnetic resonance, where the nuclear signal provides information about the chemical environment of the nucleus within a molecule, but also when sufficient density of nuclei is present, allow imaging. The stronger the magnet, the better the image quality in terms of MRI spatial resolution, but also MRSI chemical specificity. The new 11.7T will enable biomedical imaging to be significantly enhanced.
“A $2 million grant from NIH through the S10 high-end instrumentation mechanism was combined with $2.1 million matching funds from YSM Dean’s Office to purchase this state-of-the-art Bruker scanner featuring several cryoprobes to greatly enhance small animal imaging capabilities of a highly productive research community at Yale, which spans neuroscience, metabolism, cancer, physiology, physics, and engineering,” said Professor Fahmeed Hyder [GRD ’95], jointly appointed in YSM and SEAS, Head of Trumbull College, and Principal Investigator of the S10 grant.