The Amsterdam imaging core
The Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging is a joint institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, VU University Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Medical Centers – locations AMC and VUmc. The Spinoza Centre offers its ultra-sensitive MRI-scanners to four hundred researchers in the Amsterdam region for their fundamental research into the workings of the brain and brain disorders. The Centre houses a 3 Tesla and an ultra high-field 7 Tesla MRI-scanner. Ultra-high-field MRI visualizes the brain at unprecedented high resolution, in terms of function, anatomy and metabolism in the living human brain.
RESEARCH AREA
The research of the Spinoza Centre on healthy and diseased brains is focused on:
- Cognition (research into the brain’s information processing)
- Emotion (research into the the neural basis of emotion)
- Clinical neuroscience (research into clinical disorders)
- Methods and statistics (development of data acquisition and analyses techniques)
IMAGING THE BRAIN
The Spinoza Centre houses one 3 Tesla scanner and one ultra high-field 7 Tesla MRI-scanner. Currently only four human 7 Tesla MRI scanners are operational in the Netherlands. The ultra high-field MRI visualizes the brain at unprecedented high resolution, in terms of function, anatomy and metabolism in the living human brain.
The Spinoza Centre collaborates with several national and international research institutes and companies, for example the University Medical Centers of Leiden and Utrecht, both also involved in research with a 7 Tesla scanner from Philips who is also a participant in this network.
The Spinoza Centre has been supported in part by a grant from the European Fund for Regional Development (EFRO) and by contributions by the Municipality of Amsterdam and the Province of North Holland.