Etsushi Nakata1, Shunsuke Kusanagi1, Kazunari Kimura1, Rikita Araki2, Mitsuhiro Takeda1, Sosuke Yoshinaga1, and Hiroaki Terasawa1
1Department of Structural BioImaging, Faculty of Life Sciences, Kumamoto University, Kumamoto, Japan, 2Bruker Biospin K.K., Yokohama, Japan
In animal MRI research, treatments
with anesthesia and fixing apparatuses are usually required to suppress MR
image blurring due to animal movements. However,
the physiological conditions are
reportedly affected by anesthesia. At the ISMRM annual meeting in 2013, we
reported an easily implemented method for awake mouse brain imaging, which uses
softer immobilization with clothes for mice, without surgery and training.
Recently, a cryogenic
transceive coil system, which greatly enhances the SNR of MR images, was developed and is becoming widely used. We successfully improved our awake
MRI method to be applicable to the cryo system, by
refining the designed clothes.