Workflow

Idea 

Start up meeting, presentation of project.

Proof of Concept 

We can help you to test if your idea is working with our imaging modalities. Can you see what you expect? Is there enough signal and is the resolution ok? All these concepts are then improved in a real pilot. Proof of Concept is to show if it is worth doing imaging or not.

Support with Ethical Application

KERIC has long experience with the process of writing ethical applications and offer support in this process at a minor cost. This is a time consuming step and may be shortened with some help.  Of course, the PI is still responsible for having the ethical license before starting a project. We also have a number of "in house" ethical approvals that can be used if they can apply to your project.

Experimental design

We do have  experts in imaging that can help you with design and set up of your experiments, and suggest which methods we think will give you the best results.

Pilot

Test of scanning protocol and set the team that will assist in the actual experiments. A good pilot will increase optimal outcome and reliable results. For most projects a pilot is required before start with the real experiments. The pilot also includes an introduction to the lab

Optimization

In conjunction with the pilot there can be need for special optimization, especially with multimodal setup. For example, 3D printing of some special tools or set up of workflow how several modalities should work in the most optimal way with our staff to get best output from experiments within shortest timeframe Here, the animal welfare during the experiment also is in focus and taken into special account.

Animal housing

We house you animals during the whole experimental period, even if it is a larger longitudinal studied. Therefore, a stringent planning and booking of space is needed in advance.

Animal services

We can support with service during your project at KERIC, both before, during and after imaging. You can get access to our animal facility to handle them yourself or let our professional animal technicians do it for you.

Procedures

The bench fee covers most around the experiment procedures, including: A physicist/expert operating the system, Support from an animal technician with expertise in the modality, (MR, CT, PET etc.), anesthesia (eg isoflourane), contrast media, other consumables and processed images to a vendor specific raw data format, DICOM or MatLab.

There is also an option to have full support from an animal technician during scanning. In this case you do not have to be present yourself. Anyway a responsible must be accessible at all time, to be reached via phone, during the whole experimental time in case of critical decisions need to be taken.

Processing/Data analysis

Default is DICOM and raw data format for all our systems. If you want further processing such as analysis of images to get physical data over manually selected regions of interest, co-registration of images or converted to special formats, etc we can in most cases serve you with that as well, to an extra cost.

Materials & Methods

In the end when it is time to write down you result we help with Material & Methods describing what we have done here at KERIC.We appreciate if KERIC is added in the acknowledgment.

Collaboration

To do more advanced analysis of data is in general a part of the Processing/Data analysis or we can agree on a collaboration. This also extend us too help more with more detailed writing of a paperer or similar work. 

The extend and boundaries of the collaboration should be predefined. Preferentially already at the early stage of the project as such work often require considerably engagement of the whole project. Writing analysis as a part of a paper is without a collaboration agreement will be counted as extra data analysis work. Explain theory and methods in general is something we gladly assist with in all projects.

Result

It is our mission that you reach your goal with the work performed at KERIC and we will do our best to help you achieve it. Do not hesitate to contact us.