LOCATIONS
University Park Campus:
On the University Park Campus, engineering faculty, post-docs, and students have offices on the 4th floor of the Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Building (EEB) and also on the 3rd floor of the Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH). Enter through Gate 1 or 6 and the parking attendant can provide a map and walking directions. There is limited meter parking on Exposition and Vermont. The closest campus parking lot is PSA.
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Health Sciences Campus:
On the Health Sciences Campus, our experimental studies are performed at the MRI Units of the Keck Hospital (UNH), the Healthcare Consultation Center-II (HCC-II), and the Los Angeles County Hospital (LAC). For UNH and HCC-II, meter parking is available on Norfolk and San Pablo streets. MRI Units and MREL offices are in the basements of both buildings.
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SCANNERS
USC has scanners from all major vendors including GE, Siemens, Philips, and Toshiba. The majority of MREL experimental work is done on GE 3T and 1.5T whole-body scanners located on the Health Sciences Campus (see above).
A wide selection of RF coils are available for these scanners, including the standard transmit/receive body coil, neurovascular coils, torso array coils, cardiac array coils, 5-inch surface coils, and a variety of custom coils that have been developed for our research projects. The scanners are equipped with a Broadband RF subsystem and coils for 13C, 31P, and 23Na spectroscopy.
A collaborative research agreement with GE Healthcare provides our group with a high-level of technical support.
Our group maintains dedicated workstations in the MRI console rooms that are capable of gathering raw data from the scanner, and reconstructing, and displaying images with minimal latency. The scanners are also connected to oscilloscopes that provide real-time visualization of RF and gradient activity during data acquisition. These devices are indispensible during pulse sequence development and testing. We also maintain dedicated workstations for image segmentation and analysis.
OFFICE & COMPUTING
Faculty, post-docs, and students from our group have offices on the 4th floor of the Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Building (EEB) and also on the 3rd floor of the Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH). Our lab has maintains roughly 10 multi-CPU servers running the Linux operating system. Our workhorse servers, affectionately named hans and franz, each have 16 or 32 cores, and 96 Gb of RAM. A central RAID-6 fileserver hosts home directories for all users. Lab members use a combination of Mac/Linux/Windows desktops and laptop computers. For larger computing needs, we have access to USC’s Supercomputer and High Performance Computer Cluster, which is ranked as the 6th fastest supercomputer cluster in the United States and 71st worldwide as of 2013.
