3T Prisma MRI

The Biomedical Imaging Center’s instrumentation now includes a Siemens 3T Prisma – NX, a state-of-the-art whole-body 3T MRI system equipped to meet the demand for advanced research imaging at UT Austin. The system features a 60-cm bore zero boil-off magnet with improved homogeneity and advanced shimming capabilities to support high-quality imaging and multinuclear spectroscopy. It is equipped with the high-performance NX gradient-set (80mT/m max amplitude at a maximum slew rate of 200 T/m/s), which is force-compensated to reduce vibration and minimize acoustic noise. These gradients in combination with parallel transmit/receive capabilities permit extremely fast acquisition with echo-planar and non-cartesian trajectory pulse sequences. The system’s Tim 4G radiofrequency (RF) coil architecture allows up to 204 coil elements to be implemented on 64 independent RF channels, enabling flexible parallel imaging acceleration paradigms (e.g. compressed SENSE) to support high-resolution imaging with minimal artifacts. The scanner will run XA-generation electronics and software supported by a high-performance, GPU-based measurement and reconstruction system (MARS).

For neuroimaging applications, the system includes a full suite of specialized coils, including a 64-channel head/neck coil, a 32-channel head coil, and a transmit/receive circularly-polarized (CP) head coil, in addition to a standard 20-channel head/neck coil. Advanced acquisition techniques such as compressed SENSE and Simultaneous Multi-Slice (SMS) are available as standard sequences for rapid 2D and 3D anatomic imaging. These are also incorporated into echo-planar imaging (EPI) sequences for functional BOLD acquisitions, diffusion weighted imaging (DWI), and pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling (pCASL) and dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC) measurements of perfusion. Further options including readout-segmentation-of-long-variable-echo-trains (RESOLVE) and ZOOMit expand possibilities for DWI and diffusion tensor imaging to reconstruct white matter tractography even in regions with susceptibility variability. Beyond access to Siemens’ most advanced product sequences, UT Austin has a Master Research Agreement with Siemens to provide BIC researchers with access to Work-in-Progress (WIP), Investigator-requested Prototype for Research (IPR), and Customer-to-Peer (C2P) pulse sequence packages as well as the ability to develop custom sequences in-house. To support fMRI experiments, the system provides optical signals to trigger external stimulation and feedback devices.

Biomedical Imaging Center

3T Prisma MRI

SyngoMR XA User Guides (Prisma and Vida)

System Training References

Supporting Equipment

Data Handling

Operations