Facilities
Ultrasound Imaging and Therapeutics Research Laboratory
The laboratory encompasses over 2500 ft2 of laboratory space and 500 ft2 of office space in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering, University of Texas at Austin.
Generally, the laboratory has both dry and wet lab spaces appropriate for biomedical research projects in ultrasound and optics. Machining and assembly facilities are also available either within the laboratory or through the shared facilities of the Department of Biomedical Engineering Department.
Two large optical tables (Newport, Inc.), numerous general test equipment and specialized facilities needed for ultrasound and optical macro- and microscopic imaging and therapeutic studies are available in the laboratory. For optical and ultrasonic studies, single element low-frequency (1.5 MHz, 3.5 MHz, 7.5 MHz) and high-frequency (25 MHZ, 48 MHz, 80 MHz) transducers (Panametrics, Inc., Valpey-Fisher, Inc., and custom-made), several pulsers/receivers with pre-amplifiers (Panametrics, Inc. and JSR Ultrasonics, Inc.), computers with 100 MHz, 200 MHz and 500 MHz A/D capture boards (Gage Applied Technologies, Inc.), digital oscilloscopes (Tektronix, Inc.), 40 MHz and 80 MHz function/arbitrary waveform generators (Agilent, Inc.), system power supply (Agilent, Inc.), signal generator (Agilent, Inc.) are available.
Two ultrasound imaging system (Sonix RP from Ultrasonix Medical Corp. and WP32 from WinProbe Corporation) are also available – these systems are equipped with a wide range of linear, phased-array and curvi-linear probes.
Several laser sources including 30 mJ Nd:YAG Q-switched pulsed laser (New Wave), 90 mJ OPO tunable laser system (Vibrant B, Opotek, Inc.), 1W continuous wave laser are available.
Computing facilities at our laboratory include two central file servers for over 2 TB data storage, 13 Intel Pentium based PCs. A wide variety of commercial software is available on this workstation cluster, including various compilers and computer aided design packages. MATLAB (Mathworks, Inc.) is a high-performance numeric computation and visualization package integrating numerical analysis, matrix computation, signal processing and easy-to-use graphics. FEMLAB (Comsol, Inc.) is a finite element software package designed to model and simulate physical processes in many science and engineering fields. LabVIEW (National Instruments, Inc.) is a revolutionary single graphical development environment with built-in functionality for data acquisition, instrument control, measurement analysis, and data presentation. Finally, ABAQUS - advanced finite element analysis software package (ABAQUS, Inc.) is available for detailed analysis of linear, non-linear, explicit and multi-body dynamics problems including analysis of static stress/displacement, viscoelastic and viscoplastic response, transient dynamic stress/displacement, transient or steady-state heat transfer, acoustic, and thermo-mechanical (sequentially or fully coupled) problems. All computers are linked to an Ethernet backbone to provide access to the World Wide Web and to allow efficient data sharing and access, remote computation, and to access a range of on- and off-campus computational facilities.
More information and photographs of our laboratory can be found on the Laboratory page.
In addition, access to the core facilities of several programs and centers described below is available.
Animal Resources Center (ARC)
The Animal Resources Center at the University of Texas at Austin provides animal husbandry and veterinary consultation services for all UT Austin research involving laboratory animals. The ARC facility occupies 70,000 square foot facility and was designed and constructed to meet regulatory standards required for the operation of research animal facilities. The facility currently serves as primary quarters for approximately 20,000 laboratory animals yearly. The centralized facility permits efficient and up-to-date environmental control for sanitation and animal health monitoring. It also contains a diagnostic laboratory, a complete animal surgery suite, x-ray facilities, darkroom and necropsy room and a transgenic mouse facility. The center is staffed by 15 part and full-time animal attendants and technicians, an administrative assistant, an operations manager, and the director, a veterinarian whose specialty is lab animal medicine. Either the veterinarian or a technologist is on call for medical emergencies, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Veterinary and technical staff members are available also, on a scheduled basis, for procedural assistance and training in basic laboratory animal procedures. All animal research and teaching activities carried out on the University of Texas campus must be pre-approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)
TACC is a research facility at the University of Texas at Austin that deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable computational research activities of faculty, staff, and students of UT Austin. TACC also provides consulting, technical documentation, and training to support users of these resources. TACC’s comprehensive advanced computing resources include high performance computing (HPC) systems of a variety of architectures to enable larger simulations analyses and faster computation times than are possible using computers available to individual researchers, academic departments, and research centers and institutes; advanced scientific visualization (SciVis) resources including computing systems with high performance graphics hardware, large displays, and immersive environments, and high-end post-production facilities to enable large data analysis and promote knowledge discovery; and massive data storage/archival systems to store the vast quantities of data that result from performing simulations on HPC systems and developing visualizations of large data sets. TACC HPC systems include IBM Regatta-HPC p690 cluster, with 64 total 1.3 GHz POWER4 processors and 128GB of memory across four SMP nodes; IBM 40-processor Intel Itanium cluster with 800MHz processors and 80GB of memory; IBM 64-processor Intel Pentium III cluster with 1GHz processors and 32GB of memory; and 16-processor Cray SV1 vector-processing shared-memory system with 16GB memory. TACC also operates an immersive visualization laboratory consisting of 24-processor Onyx2 with 6 Infinite Reality 2 graphics pipes; cylindrically-symmetric, 3x1 edge-blended front-projection power wall; large-panel, 5x2 tiled power wall; and various video and audio editing systems. Finally, TACC provided a data storage system comprised of a SGI Origin 2000 running the Data Migration Facility (DMF) software and supported by a StorageTek PowderHorn tape silo with a current media capacity of 80 terabytes and a maximum potential capacity of 1/3 terabyte.
NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) Program
The IGERT program at the University of Texas at Austin has both user and faculty facilities. The user facility has several advanced optical and image processing equipment including Zeiss Deconvolution Microscope Workstation with full featured KS-400 image processing software, Nicolet Magna IR-560 FTIR Spectrophotometer (Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrophotometer) with added (AEM) Auxiliary Experimental Module, Beckman DU 7400 UV/Visible diode array Spectrophotometer with added peltier temperature controlled cuvette holder, Photon Technologies International Quanta Master Model C Cuvette based scanning Spectrofluorometer with an added Laser Fluorescence lifetime module. These resources are readily available to IGERT faculty and affiliated users. In addition, specialized IGERT faculty facilities are also available.
Center for Nano- and Molecular Science and Technology
The Center is located in Nano Science and Technology Building – a state of the art educational and research facility. Shared resources including JEOL 2010F Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM), The FEI Strata™ DB235 – a dual beam SEM/FIB system combing a scanning electron microscope (SEM) with thermal emission tip for high resolution imaging and a focused ion beam (FIB) with gallium metal ion beam source for nanoscale cutting, LEO 1530 scanning electron microscope, Asylum Research Molecular Force Probe 3D AFM and many other devices and installations are available to certified users.
Texas Materials Institute (TMI)
The Texas Materials Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and affiliated research centers support central facilities that are staffed by a facility manager who is responsible for training, maintenance, or to answer questions regarding use of this equipment. The Center provides faculty and students on the UT-Austin campus with the instrumentation and associated infrastructure needed to conduct modern materials research. In addition, the Center promotes interdisciplinary research in the area of materials at UT-Austin and helps to coordinate all aspects of materials research and education among the participating departments.
