Institutional Setting & Resources

The UC BIRL is located in the basement of the School of Medicine at the University of Colorado Denver (UCD) (http://www.uchsc.edu/), and benefits from the extensive campus-wide and departmental facilities - physical, technical, human, and administrative that support the wide ranging research programs based at the institution. UC BIRL is connected via a basement walkway to the Biomagnetic Imaging Laboratory http://www.uchsc.edu/sm/psych/meg/) a magnetoencephalography (MEG) facility located in the Department of Psychiatry facilities at UCD. UC BIRL is also connected by tunnel to the University of Colorado Hospital, which houses two 1.5 T MR instruments (GE LX and Siemens Vision) and two GE CT scanners. New clinical and educational facilities are being constructed at the 200 acre Fitzsimons campus located several miles east of the University of Colorado Hospital site. The Fitzsimons campus will house the Office of National Drug Control Policy 3T magnet facility, which is a federally funded 14,000 sq. ft drug abuse research facility, a combined Psychiatry /Radiology effort. The Fitzsimons campus also includes the Anschutz Center for Advanced Medicine, the outpatient facility for the University of Colorado Hospital, housing a 1.5 T Symphony MR system, a Siemens PET instrument, and a Siemens CT scanner.

Other regional intellectual and physical resources benefit the UC BIRL activities. The Denver Veterans' Affairs Medical Center is located adjacent to the main UCD campus, and its MR facility (1.5 T Philips NT instrument) has been involved in collaborative research programs.

Image Transmission and Storage:

UC BIRL maintains a DICOM server and micro-PACS designed to accommodate the needs of multiple image-based clinical trials and research projects. Access to the server is controlled via a combination of password protection, firewall, and IP filtering schemes. We can load DICOM CDs and translate data from GE, Siemens and Philips devices.

Daily, weekly and monthly backups are performed on all new image data. Data archiving is performed using Ultrium 100/200 Gb tapes. Data can be retrieved from the server via ftp, DICOM, Ultrium tape, CD-R or DVD-R.

Image Viewing and Analysis:

Viewing and annotation of images is provided by FDA 510k approved software, operating on workstations with >1K displays. Access to workstations is password and firewall protected.

The laboratory also maintains a suite of analysis tools and applications for fMRI, diffusion imaging, segmentation and volumetric analysis, image registration, and image fusion. UC BIRL has the ability to segment gray and white brain matter, CSF, abnormal tissue (lesion) and the intracranial cavity. The semi-automated tools can be customized for specific segmentation needs, using neural network, bi-feature space, statistical or gradient methodologies.