Facilities

Laboratories under direct supervision of BME faculty are described below. However, many BME graduate students work in research laboratories of collaborators in other disciplines, such as Living State Physics, Molecular Physiology & Biophysics, Cell Biology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pulmonary Medicine, Ophthalmology, Orthopaedics, and Cardiology.

Cellular & Intracellular Bioengineering Laboratory (Rooms 5932 & 5926 Stevenson Center). Dr. Galloways lab, the Surgical Navigation Apparatus Research Lab (SNARL) has a 320 square foot Mock Operating Room and a 480 sq. foot system design and phantom construction laboratory.  In addition, he and a colleague share the use of a 390 sq. ft conference room with film, slide and video display capabilities. SNARL has14 computers.   Three are Unix Workstations the others are PCs The SNARL Laboratory can pull medical images directly from the Medical Center backbone.  The PI has 4 surgical guidance systems (three optical, one magnetic) with tracked probes, stimulators and the fabrication facilities to create new optically tracked devices. 
 
SNARL has 4 proprietary optically image-guided surgery systems (value of $300k each). In addition, it has a magnetic tracking system and has three ultrasound imaging systems.  Further, it has  two laser range scanners which can be used to support image-guided procedures.

Physiological Systems Laboratory (5918 SC, 700 sf.) This laboratory contains instrumentation for the measurement and recording of pressure and flow in acute, anesthetized cardiovascular preparations. It also contains equipment for optical measurement of tracers in blood and physiological fluids, including a CO2 infrared laser. The laboratory contains 2 data acquisition computers (486-level PCs).

Flow Imaging Laboratory (SC 5912 and SC 5912A, 800 sf.) This laboratory provides support space for flow imaging experiments conducted on magnetic resonance imaging scanners located in the medical center. The incorporated "K-space" laboratory (SC 5912A) provides space for computing work related to flow and other MR imaging projects. It has four network connections and currently contains two personal computers.

Surgical Navigation Apparatus Research Lab (SNARL) (5902 SC, 5906 SC, 2150 sf) The SNARL laboratory is designed as a laboratory for the development of therapeutic guidance devices, techniques and processes. The lab contains approximately 15 workstation class computers with a combined memory of 8 GB and disk storage capabilites of a quarter of a terabyte. Beyond the computers the lab has a HP 650MB Magneto-optical disk drive, two Yamaha 4x CD-ROM recorder, and a Catamount 6250 bpi tape drive. For real-time data acquisition there is a 100M samples per second A/D board, a 1GHz. Tektronix digital scope and three video frame grabbers. The University has 155 MB ATM backbone (to which SNARL is directly linked). In addition, there is a direct ATM link between the Radiology PACs system and SNARL. For surgical guidance the SNARL has 2 Northern Digital Optotrak 3020’s and two proprietary custom-built articulated arms. For intraoperative imaging the SNARL lab has a Moeller-Wedel operating microscope, an HP B-Mode Color Doppler ultrasound machine and assorted endoscopy devices.

Visual Information Processing Laboratory (Jacobs Hall, Rooms 279 and 281, 800 sf.) The laboratory includes a recording center, where responses to controlled stimuli are logged. Recordings are made from both single nerve cells (extra- and intracellular) and the cortical visually-evoked potential. Data collection and processing are supported by microcomputer data acquisition systems. Facilities for histological preparation and viewing of brain tissue are also provided. The focus of the lab is on understanding the microcircuitry of the visual cortex.

Medical Computing Laboratory (Medical Center North Room B-1323, 700 sf.) This facility houses two Compaq Proliant Servers running Windows NT. One server has a RAID level 5 disk array with 16 Gbytes storage. It serves as an application server including MS IIS. There is also a Compaq Prosignia server running IntraNetware, with 20 Gbytes of storage. The Netware server acts as a file and print server. It hosts data collected during basic and clinical trials of experimental therapy mainly in diseases of the lung, and acute lung injury. All of the servers in the Biomedical Computing Laboratory are connected via 100 MBPS ethernet to the Vanderbilt Medical Center network backbone.

Biomedical Engineering Cardiopulmonary & Perfused Organ Laboratories (Medical Center North, Rooms U-1207 & B1321, 1150 sf) These laboratories are used to study cardiopulmonary responses in animals and isolated organs. Major items of equipment include electromagnetic flowmeters, laser diode instrumentation, pressure and flow transducers, a humidification box, pH meters, gamma radiation detectors and instrumentation, defibrillator, multi-channel physiological strip chart recorders with appropriate signal amplifiers, centrifuges, surgical instruments, roller pumps, respirators, an anesthesia machine, and microcomputers for data acquisition and digitization. Gamma and beta scintillation counters are housed nearby.

Biomedical Engineering Chromatography Laboratory (Medical Center North Room -B1321C) This laboratory is designed for preparative and analytic bio-molecular separation studies using low pressure and high performance chromatography. It contains multi-wavelength UV and fluorescence spectrophotometers, a refractive index detector, a differential viscometer, HPLC pump, roller pumps, several chromatography columns, and personal computers with A/D converters for data acquisition and analysis.

Radiological Science Research Laboratories (Medical Center North and VU Hospital) The laboratories incorporate many modalities with a special focus on magnetic resonance. The high-field MR research facility houses a 4.7 Tesla, 40 cm bore imaging spectrometer with support labs, including a chemistry wet-lab and an electronics fabrication lab for coil construction with complete animal care facilities, a digital radiographic laboratory, a nuclear imaging laboratory, and an ultrasound laboratory nearby - all dedicated to research. An image processing lab includes several workstations and personal computers. State-of-the-art equipment in the department includes three 1.5 Tesla, 2 meter bore MRI scanners, a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner, a combined SPECT/CT scanner, and three spiral scan CT scanners, all of which are available for research use outside clinical service hours. The research laboratories include office space for faculty and graduate students and are available for support and collaboration. In addition, a 3.0T whole body MR scanner is a new University resource.

Free Electron Laser (FEL) Center. (700 sf of laboratory space available for BME optics and x-ray imaging research). The Vanderbilt FEL Center is unique it that it is the only FEL in the world that is dedicated to basic medical and clinical research. This facility, located immediately next to the Science and Engineering Building, houses physics laboratories, animal operating rooms, and an entire floor dedicated to human clinical care, including operating suites.

Biomedical Optics Laboratories (5802 SC, 5806 SC, 5812 SC). The Biomedical Optics Laboratories in the Department of Biomedical Engineering were initiated by a Special Opportunity Award from the Whitaker Foundation. These facilities include 2000 sf of newly refurbished state-of-the-art laboratory space dedicated to biomedical optics research and education located on the 8^th floor of the Engineering and Science Building, immediately adjacent to the Vanderbilt Medical Center. The optics facilities include a teaching laboratory for biomedical optics education at both graduate and undergraduate levels. In addition, three offices are available for faculty and postdoctoral students, as well as cubicle space for graduate students. Major specialized equipment can be found in these laboratories, including an inverted fluorescence microscope; spectral imaging camera; single photon counting imaging system - specially dedicated to measuring luciferase bioluminescence; optical coherence tomography (OCT) system (built in house); pulsed infrared laser with Holmium:YAG, Erbium:YAG, Nd:YAG and Alexandrite cavities; integrated fluorescence spectroscopy system consisting of CCD camera, spectrograph, nitrogen-dye laser, laptop computer, and probe; integrated Raman spectroscopy system consisting of deep depletion, back-illuminated CCD, spectrograph, interfaced via PC, and probe; UV-Vis-NIR spectrophotometer; and, nitrogen-dye laser. Other equipment includes a variety of optics and optics hardware (lenses, filters, mirrors, beamsplitters, mounts, posts, translation stages, etc.), fiberoptics and related hardware, including (couplers, polisher, cutters); 3 HeNe lasers; 2 GreNe lasers; raytracing software; incubator; and 7 vibration isolated optical tables. More than 20 PC's (at least Pentium II, 200 MHz) are available in the biomedical optics group for instrument control (through LabVIEW), data collection, data analysis, simulation and computation.

Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMI). (4th Floor, Annette and Irwin Eskind Biomedical Library, 8,000 sf.) Space is available for six faculty members, ten informatics trainees, and five to seven staff programmers. Each workstation has access to the campus-wide fiber-optic backbone. From this backbone, investigators are able to access all of the computing resources on both the medical center and the University campuses as well as those resources available via the Internet.