MRI CryoProbe

New Signal-to-Noise Horizons in Small Animal MRI

R&D 100 Award

Bruker BioSpin MRI offers the MRI CryoProbe™ for the BioSpec®.  PharmaScan® and ClinScan® (work-in-progress) product lines. It features very low temperature, closed cycle cooled RF-coils and preamplifiers delivering an increase in sensitivity of a factor of 2.5 over standard room temperature RF-coils in routine MRI applications.
 

Mouse brain (cerebellum) in vivo (T2* weigted images) at 25 µm in plane resolution
Mouse in vivo (T2* weighted images) at 25 µm in plane resolution

Main Features

  • Increase in sensitivity by a factor of 2.5
  • Higher spatial resolution and shorter scan times
  • Flexible design for easy siting
  • Cold surface contact with the animal eliminated by monitoring and warming provisions
  • Cooling down outside the magnet 

  • All safety requirements with respect to the user and the animal are fulfilled

mouse brain
Inflow angiography of the mouse brain without contrast agent at 39µm x 59µm x 220µm

High Resolution Angiography of Mouse Brain

Use of the MRI CryoProbe in routine imaging of the mouse brain in vivo at 9.4 T leads to outstanding image quality. The high signal-to-noise ratio obtained with the MRI CryoProbe enables high resolution angiograpgy showing tiny vessels in the mouse brain.

MRI CryoProbe technology
MRI CryoProbe

MRI CryoProbe Technology

Bruker’s MRI CryoProbe uses cryogenic RF coils and preamplifiers cooled by a closed-cycle refrigeration system. Because thermal noise of the RF coil and the associated electronics are comparable to the sample noise in small animal MRI, the coil performance can be significantly improved by a strong reduction of this noise contribution. Bruker BioSpin is the pioneer in the development of CryoProbe technology for high-resolution NMR with over 650 CryoProbes installed at customer sites worldwide during the last nine years.
 

Easy-to-use CryoProbe Setup

Animal handling and supervision of the MRI CryoProbes is very similar to standard room temperature RF-coils. CryoProbe cooling can be accomplished outside the magnet ensuring optimum usage of the scanner time.

For more information please refer to ISMRM 2008 abstract:
'Routine high resolution MRI in small animals at 9.4 Tesla using a cryogenic quadrature transceive RF probe'
C. Baltes1, N. I. Radzwill2, S. C. Bosshard1, D. Marek3, and M. Rudin 1,4

1Institute for Biomedical Engineering, University and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, 2Bruker BioSpin MRI, Ettlingen, Germany, 3Bruker BioSpin AG, Fällanden, Switzerland, 4Institute of Pharmacology, University Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland'