MIAMI: The Queen has opened Cardiff University’s new £44m Brain Research Imaging Centre (Cubric).
It has been called the “most significant advance in brain imaging in Europe in the last 10 years”.
The Maindy Park building brings together four hi-tech scanners under one roof.
One of them, described as the “Hubble space telescope of neuroscience”. is the first outside the United States.
The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were given a tour of the Cubric centre, which is the biggest of its kind in Europe and one of the best equipped in the world.
Although not the largest, the most sophisticated at the centre is the Connectom scanner. It is six times more powerful than a conventional hospital MRI scanner.
The Queen asked: “Strokes vary the brain, is that correct?”
Prof Derek Jones, director of Cubric, agreed and said one of the machine’s functions would be to research how a damaged brain’s behaviour could be studied to improve rehabilitation.