Leading Edge Facilities at Sunnybrook Research Institute (SRI) in Toronto are Amazing

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Last month, John Snell, Ph.D. (Technical Director of the FUS Foundation Brain Program) and I visited Sunnybrook Research Institute (SRI) in Toronto, ON. We had the pleasure of touring the incredible facilities there.

Kullervo Hynynen, Ph.D., Director of the Imaging Centre, showed us around the research space that houses the labs of nearly 20 faculty members doing imaging research. This space includes dedicated clinical, pre-clinical and laboratory areas for research in focused ultrasound.  In addition, the Centre has manufacturing capabilities for transducer design and development. Thus, its staff can build solutions in-house and test them through the full translational process from design through pre-clinical and clinical testing.

The SRI team has access to two dedicated research magnets (1.5T and 3T), a Toshiba 320 slice CT, a Bruker small animal 7T MRI system and the InSightec commercial brain system as well as homebuilt transducer systems.  In addition, the nearby Odette Cancer Centre houses the Philips Sonalleve body system.

A two-floor vivarium is currently being built and slated to open in September 2011, which will enhance the existing capabilities by allowing for greater access to the full spectrum of translational research models.

We certainly enjoyed our visit to SRI and look forward to the leading edge translational research in MR-guided focused ultrasound we that we expect will continue to come out of this group!