UT Arlington Optical Medical Imaging Lab at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas

The Bill and Rita Clements Advanced Medical Imaging Building features 18 specially-designed bays for clinical and research imaging devices. The largest of these houses one of the nation’s first 7-Tesla magnetic resonance imaging devices for human studies. The Medical Imaging Center’s state-of-the-art equipment will provide a catalyst to major collaborative projects involving UT Arlington and UT Dallas and UT Southwestern faculty members and clinicians who will occupy offices and laboratories in the building.

College of Engineering researchers in the Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering departments will use four labs in the Center. Initial projects there include:

• 1. the development of a DLP® Hyperspectral Imager for surgical and clinical use (conducted in association with Texas Instruments); 
• 2. the use of a two-photon microscope for photon counting and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy to study how DNA strand breaks (caused, for example, by exposure to ionizing radiation during treatment of cancer) are being repaired by the body’s cellular machinery;
• 3. using diffuse optical imaging for functional brain activities and for tumor diagnosis and prognosis under a variety of treatments;
• 4. using coherent optical tomography to locate targeted nanoparticles that have attached themselves to diseased organs.