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The Focused Ultrasound Laboratory comprises over 4500 square feet of research and office space on the fifth floor of the Longwood Medical Research Center (LMRC). The laboratory is exceptionally-well equipped to perform all requisite tasks of basic ultrasound research and system development.
Mechanical and electronic facilities: The laboratory contains equipment to fabricate custom ultrasound transducer arrays, including a diamond wire saw, a precision dicing saw, and evacuation chambers for forming backing layers. The lab's machine shop features a CNC micro-router, lathe, band saw, table saw, and drill press. The laboratory also has a computer-controlled laser cutting system to make transducer housings and prototype devices. The laboratory's electronic facility contains a considerable variety of electronic components to build customized equipment, as well as to troubleshoot and repair components. The facility includes several 4-channel digital oscilloscopes, a network analyzer, a vector impedance meter, multiple pc-based data acquisition systems, pc-based frequency and signal generators, a spectrum analyzer, arbitrary waveform generators, high voltage fixed and variable capacitors, broad and narrow band preamplifiers, and equipment to design and print its own circuit boards.
Ultrasound characterization and measurement: Five 3D computerized high resolution positioning and beam plotting systems are available, each with integrated data acquisition equipment for acoustic characterization, and with all basic equipment required for US experiments (test tanks, RF-amplifiers, arbitrary waveform generators, oscilloscopes, voltmeters, hydrophones, and cavitation detectors). A degasser and radiation force balance are available for general use. The laboratory is equipped with a 128-channel and a 256-channel VeraSonics US system, both of which allow custom control of transmitted signals and record full RF time-traces from received channels. Access is available to the department's wide range clinical US systems, and in-house software is available to convert Philips 4D datasets into binary format for offline analysis. An assortment of transducers and arrays, both commercial and in-house manufactured, are available for tests and clinical studies. These range from interstitial needle applicators to intracavitary probes, to external phased arrays. The laboratory also has research access to the department's MRI and CT facilities, including systems located on the ground floor of the LMRC. Several fully integrated MRI-compatible US systems can be used for custom MRI-guided experiments and for verification of US measurements. In addition, there are three commercial MRI-guided therapeutic focused ultrasound systems with MRI-compatible positioning and sonication systems integrated into one of the department's GE MR systems including the Exablate 3000 brain treatment system with a 1000-element phased-array for clinical trials, as well as an in-house system for the testing of phased-array applicators. The lab's Class A lab space includes two fume hoods and a cell culture hood, a cold room, warm room, and freezers, regular microscopes for histology evaluation, perfusion equipment, an ATL US system, and two surgery microscopes for microsurgeries. The lab also has an MRI-compatible anesthesia gas delivery system, an EEG system, and a small animal monitoring system. A full-time animal surgeon and two full-time research technicians are on staff to operate equipment and assist with experiments.
Computer Facilities: The laboratory has four high-end PC workstations, access to the MGH/BWH High Performance Computing Cluster (over 600 cores, 7 Tflops of computing power, 1.5TB memory and 32 TB of extremely high performance storage), and is additionally affiliated with the department's Surgical Planning Lab (SPL), which provides considerable support and expertise in the fields of networking and computer science. The SPL is a computation-oriented lab, specialized in the processing and display of medical images. The SPL network, servers, and software (e.g. Matlab), are available to the lab. Additional technical software (e.g. Mathematica) is also available through Harvard Medical School's site license. The laboratory has linear and nonlinear theoretical models that can predict the US field distribution and the absorbed energy deposition in three-dimensional tissue volumes with irregularly shaped tissue interfaces. Simple models used to simulate the US field in a homogenous medium are also available for rapid characterization, as are simulation programs for predicting the temperature elevation generated by the US beams in tissue. The focused ultrasound laboratory also has developed a software package to evaluate MR temperature imaging during focused US experiments at the MRI in real-time.
The unique scientific environment offered by the laboratory's facilities and staff will contribute significantly to the overall success of the group.
