Laboratory description

Resources

The Laboratory has a surface of 300 m2, including offices, electronics workshop and labotarory-operating room for molecular imaging. Of particular interest is the availability of molecular imaging devices (high resolution PET and CT), the first ones installed in Spain. It also has access to the shared facilities of the Unit of Experimental Medicine and Surgery, such as animal housing, operating rooms, mechanical workshop, etc.(see photographs). The Laboratory has approximately 18 researchers (8 staff and 10 grant-holders on average), as well as a variable number of students and visitors from other centers.

Projects

The most important part of the funding comes from external resources. In the last 4 years the Laboratory has undertaken more than 25 national and international public research projects; it also receives funding from private Institutions and from royalties derived from technology transference to the industry. Most of these projects have been coordinated with other Institutions, two of them being noteworthy: a contract for strategic research groups in the Comunidad de Madrid and an Excellence Network for Molecular and Multimodality Imaging (IM3), from the Ministry of Health. In the former, between 2000-2004, the Laboratory coodinated medical imaging research from four groups belonging to the Spanish Open University (UNED), Polytechnic University (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the National Research Council (CSIC). The IM3 network, started in 2003, comprises 50 groups from 29 centers all over Spain.

Teaching and Research

More than 250 scientific contributions in the last five years, many of them in relevant international journals, totalling more than 190 in Impact Factor (JCR 2005). Details and reprints can be found in the section " Scientific activity".
The Laboratory has produced 10 PhD Theses (three of them as European Doctorate) and more than 20 Master Theses, some of them international. More than 45 grant holders have completed a stay in the Laboratory, which has also organized more than 50 postgraduate courses, including two editions of a Master's in Biomedical Engineering of 70 credits.

Technology Transfer

Since 1998, when the first technology transference contract was signed with SUINSA (a teleradiology system: TELRA), the Laboratory has been active in developing and marketing different hi-tech systems, including a high resolution CT scanner and several PET and combined CT-PET scanners, for use in experimental biomedical reserach. One of these PET systems constitutes a references in the insustry and is currently being marketed by General Electric. Tha Laboratory has also transferred echocardiographic quantification software to SIEMENS-ACUSON.
In 2004 the Unit received the "UNICEM award for technological innovation" from the Madrid Chamber of Commerce.