NHS Together

Transcription

CRICBristol has three main facilities. There's the Clinical Investigation Suite, which comprises four clinical-research rooms, a wet laboratory, a clean utility and a dirty utility. The second main research facility is a two-bedroom sleep-study suite, which also has neurophysiological monitoring and video monitoring. And the jewel in the crown is our high-field 3 Tesla MRI full-body scanner in our MRI Suite that also has with it a stimulus and audio-visual delivery system. In the MRI, we have an MR-compatible eye-tracking system. It allows us to track very micro eye movements that people naturally make when they're looking at a visual scene. These eye tracks are controlled by your brain, so the scanner is imaging your brain as your eyes are moving, looking at the visual stimuli being presented and then we can look at which brain regions are controlling these eye movements. CRICBristol is designed to be able to accommodate a very large range of research from neonates to ageing population And we are able to do very specific clinical studies such as prostate- and bladder-cancer studies to measure pre- and post-cancer treatment to see how effective the treatment is at reducing the tumours. We also do a lot of studies with the School of Experimental Psychology. They are looking at mapping brain function for various tasks such as looking at memory, language, attention - so we have MR-compatible sensory stimulation equipment. Then we can look in the brain to map what's called the somatosensory cortex. We are a dedicated research facility open to all clinical and academic researchers. It is a centre for translational research, so we can do those detailed studies, looking at brain function, or brain biochemistry, bringing the scientists from universities and the clinicians from the NHS together to make advances both scientifically and clinically.