Will taking a MRI and CT scan of a pigs brain be tricky to manage?
Answer:
You want to go through an nouns committee if you want your research taken seriously. It depends on what you plan on doing to change mind perfusion. I would think that if lower than narcosis, you could get through an nouns committee without issue.
Funding have better be good, as getting pigs and doing the radiology test are expensive!
As for the structure comment above me, I am certain that the personage knows this. However, if he requests to see changes within cerebral perfusion contained by different conditions, a pig model is probably a good choice.
dont progress thru the ethics commision, a short time ago get a pig cultivator to agree to letting you use some of his animals. I dont think that the structure of the pigs brain is going to be valid if you are trying to diagnose a problem in humans though
Exactly how much do you know something like porcine anesthesia and its effects on cerebral blood flow?
Anesthetics affect CBF by various mechanisms contained by humans, and I suspect that is true surrounded by pigs as well. Are you also planning on measure their end-tidal CO2 (which will certainly be artificial by narcotics and is a major determinant of CBF)? Are these pigs going to be intubated? How are you going to determine the pigs' hemodyanamic parameters? Narcotics own a profound effect on both heart rate and blood pressure in humans, and, unsurprisingly, hemodynamics are very key with admiration to CBF.
If these factors are not taken into consideration, any research you do will be worthless.
Then you enjoy the issue of keeping a pig still in an MRI. (Have you be in an MRI? Those things are loud and worrisome.) We have trouble next to that in humans, and you can REASON next to most of them.
I'd say, unless you hold considerable experience in instrumenting and studying pigs, you're going to be passageway out of your league.
It will be difficult to get through an animals within research committee without proof.
First, exactly what hypothesis do have that you want to tryout?
Second, before the expense and difficulty setting up an experiment beside a pig -- getting the harness and coil of the right shape for the pig's head within an MRI and the CT, perhaps do a pilot study within a rat, for which there are plenty of small animal coils and stereotaxic harness suitable for x-ray.
Finally, or perhaps first, read some articles going on for cerebral perfusion studies contained by animals that compare CT and MRI. I would wager that CT has not be done because it takes a while to shoot the series, and hence does not provide reliable temporal background. Most blood-flow studies are done with a laser doppler velocimetric verbs inserted in a larger artery. I recommend inquiring the archives of Neurology, Journal of Cerebrovascular Research, or Neurosurgery. Or even do a search on "CT measurements psychological blood flow" at Pubmed.
I agree with the reservations expressed by Pangolin and Lane.
Clinical radiology departments will not allow you to use animals on alike scanner they use for patients, so you would need access to research or veterinary scanners.
You would inevitability a head coil for the MRI. From a radiology perspective, the pig would own to be well sedated because motion would be a crucial problem, particularly near MRI. Pangolin has covered the issues near sedation.
To make the study comparable to humans, you would call for power injectors for the contrast, and you would need to know the injection protocols for pigs. Presumably these are available contained by the literature, but are already established for humans.
Perfusion MRI and CT are both currently in clinical use contained by humans (though perfusion CT is not widely used), so it seems to me that a pig study is resembling trying to reinvent the wheel (this may depend on your hypothesis).
My suggestion would be to pay envelope students (or any healthy, financially challenge group to which you have access) to contribute. In the long run this will probably be cheaper than trying to set up a pig study, and if you are talking something like using only one pig, conceivably you only requirement to pay one or two students.