UI plans to buy $7 million scanner for research

IOWA CITY - University of Iowa officials plan to purchase a $7 million whole-body scanner for research that will be the first of its kind in the state.

UI officials will seek state Board of Regents approval next week to buy the General Electric MR950 7T (Tesla) Whole Body Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Scanner for nearly $7 million. Equipment purchases at the regent institutions costing more than $1 million require board approval. The purchase will be funded with a National Institutes of Health high-end instrumentation grant awarded to Dr. Vincent Magnotta in the department of radiology at UI Hospitals and Clinics.

The imaging scanner will provide ultra-high field whole body scanning capabilities for MRI research and is a state of the art piece of equipment, UI officials said. It will be housed in the new Pappajohn Biomedical Discovery Building, currently under construction. The scanner will be integrated into the Iowa Institute for Biomedical Imaging, the University of Iowa's Clinical and Translation Science Award, and the National Cancer Institute funded cancer center, officials said.

It's being acquired to support the research efforts of 33 funded National Institutes of Health investigators from five colleges - medicine, engineering, public health, liberal arts and sciences, and business) with more than 40 NIH grants. This group of researchers has a wide range of interests including functional brain mapping, high-resolution anatomical imaging of the brain, spectroscopy of the brain, evaluation of tumor response to treatment and cardiovascular imaging.

The scanner will significantly advance research efforts at the UI by allowing higher spatial resolution images to be acquired, increased signal to noise ratio, faster scan times, increased spectral resolution for spectroscopic studies and sodium images to be acquired, UI officials said.

Three medical vendors participated in a competitive proposal process for the scanner purchase.