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Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre

Cerebrovascular physiology

Woman helping a man who's about to enter an MRI machine.
We have a variety of equipment within our MRI suites that can help us to quantify metabolic changes within the brain.

Many of our methods require the implementation of a respiratory challenge during the MRI scan in order to quantify changes in tissue energetics.

This typically includes delivery of variations in CO2 and O2 gas mixtures, as well as room air to the participant through a breathing circuit.

We have a variety of in-house set-ups located within each 3T and 7T MRI suites that can be used for experiments where we want to quantify metabolic changes within the brain.

RespirAct™ Gas Control System in an MRI suite.
Our equipment allows our researchers to carefully control the concentrations of the gas mixtures that participants breathe out.

Our latest set-up includes a RespirAct system that permits the researcher to control the end tidal concentrations of the gas mixtures that the participant breathes out.

We have also developed an MR-compatible Lower Body Negative Pressure (LBNP) chamber to provide blood pressure challenges to measure auto regulation within the MR environment.

In addition to these physiological challenge systems, we have a fully equipped physiology laboratory where we conduct exercise intervention studies.