pHARMACEUTICAL ORTHOPAEDIC RESEARCH LAB - University of Alberta

Our Facilities

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MicroCT suite

High resolution micro-CT imaging has arrived at the University of Alberta Campus! 

Thanks to Federal funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the PORL has successfully established Edmonton’s first “in-vivo” micro-CT Imaging Suite at the University of Alberta, to non-invasively quantify bone and mineral adaptations after pharmaceutical, orthopaedic, orthodontic and biomedical interventions.

With the advent of high-resolution micro-CT at this University, collaborative research has begun between The Faculty of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences and many disparate faculties on this campus, including Chemical & Materials Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Medicine & Dentistry, and Electrical & Computer Engineering.

The Pharmacy micro-CT imager is the first of its kind in Edmonton, and has enabled us to measure the efficacy of newly discovered bone drugs non-invasively, and over several months to help identify drug candidates with the greatest therapeutic benefit using the most appropriate regimen.

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Model	SkyScan 1076	SkyScan 1176
scan	In-vivo /ex-vivo	In-vivo/ex-vivo
X-ray Source	sealed X-ray tube 20-100kV, spot size <5µm, 10W	90kV X-ray source
X-ray Detector	4000x2672pixels, 12bit, fiber-optically coupled to scintillator	4000x2672pixels, 12bit, fiber-optically coupled to scintillator
Scan Volume	68mm diam., 20mm(suggested 14mm) single scan length, 200mm scannable length	68mm diam., 20mm single scan length, 200mm scannable length
Spatial Resolution	<9µm pixel size, <15µm low-contrast resolution (10%MTF)	<9µm pixel size, <15µm low-contrast resolution (10%MTF)
Reconstruction Slices	9µm/18µm/35µm selectable pixel size	9µm/18µm/35µm selectable pixel size
Gating	breathing, heartbeat etc.	breathing, heartbeat..etc.
In-vivo animal scan	Rats, mouse..	Available for larger animal.,e.g. chicken, rabbit..
Services for	Industries (contact OMX Inc.)	Academics

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PORL Lab Room 2-108

There are more than 20 professional instruments in the main lab of PORL. Besides, a Cell Culture room and Bacterial Shaker Room are also well installed.

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Alpha Innotech Corporation Multiimage Light Cabinet With Camera & Filters	BIO-TEK,EL808-Microplate Reader(Elisa Reader; Luminometer)	Buehler-IsoMet®1000-Sawing Machine
Cole-Parmer Polystat- Stainless Steel Heated Bath	Waters 600S-HPLC	Eppendorf Mastercycler® ep Thermal Cyclers-PCR research
Fisher Scientific-accume AB15- pH-mV-C Meters	Forma-Series II 3110-Water-Jacketed CO2 Incubators	Instron4443-Material Testing System
Lab-Tek - REICHERTJUNG BIOCUT 1130-ROTARY MICROTOME	SANYO-MPR-414F,14.9cu.ft.- Pharmaceutical Refrigerator with Freezer	Sorvall Legend RT-Refrigerated Table Top Centrifuge

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Software

Our microCT suties are equipped with a series of imaging processing software from SkyScan.

Function	Program (SkyScan)
Reconstruction Server	Nrecon Server
Reconstruction	Nrecon
Image Analysis	CTAn
3 planes view of images	DataViewer
3Dimensional Viewing	CTVol
3Dimensional Viewing	CTvox
Batch Job Processing	BatMan

 

Besides of those commercial softwares from SkyScan(Konitch,Belgium), PORL also has the latest version of Mimics (Materilise, Luven, Belgium) for imaging segmentations and 3 dimensional modeling for Finite Element Analysis.

PORL also cooperates with Dr. Samer Adeeb in Civil Engineering to have the resource of ABAQUS (SIMULIA, Providence RI) for finite element analysis on biomechanics.

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Faculty Infrastructure for Pharmaceutical Analysis

Waters 2795-Mass Spectrometer-Ionization and fragmentation of a molecule in a magnetic field
NMR(Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) Spectrometer-Identifies the composition of a molecule based on nuclear spin

 

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