Siemens has announced creation of a new Magnetic Resonance (MR) collaboration and scientific support team in the U.S. The team will be supervised by Collaboration Manager, Patrick Revell and MR Scientist, Dr. Craig Buckley. The team will support the development of collaboration partnerships with UK-based researchers to further clinical and methodological MR development.

"The creation of a dedicated MR collaboration and scientific support team will enhance the support provided to our research customers, as well as assisting in the development of new techniques," said Patrick Revell, Collaboration Manager of the MR team at Siemens Healthcare. "Collaborative initiatives like these will yield some techniques that are commercially viable and that can then be developed into new products delivering benefits to the wider medical community. This two-way approach will therefore help to progress MR-based research in basic science and spearhead new clinical techniques."

Research institutions often purchase high performance MR systems to investigate new methods of imaging biological systems. In the research agreements, the institution may modify allow the existing sequence source code for novel research projects. Now, the specialist MR team will provide close UK support with pulse sequence coding and system development so that institution researchers will be equipped with the necessary Siemens backup to help achieve their goals.

"MR is a highly useful research tool that yields the optimum results when partnered with relevant application software," said Julie Shepherd, MR Product Manager at Siemens Healthcare. "The new MR collaboration and scientific support team will ensure that research teams maximize the benefits of their purchase with imaging sequences that fulfill all their research requirements."

Current collaboration agreements already exist at research institutions including The Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. The scientific support team provides local support and secure links between Siemens developers and UK research institutions.

Adapted from a press release from Siemens.