Policies
Core Facility Resource Grant Insert Statement
A Small Animal Radiation Research Platform image-guided irradiator by Xstrahl will be used to focally treat a tumor or specific site on the animal. CT imaging will be used to first image the structure that will be irradiated. The isocenter will then be calculated to the organ or tissue and then the X-ray dose and delivery scheme will then be configured. This can be performed once or multiple times for fractionated irradiation schemes.
Acknowledgement Statement
Services and equipment in the Image Guided Radiation Core are provided with ongoing support from external funding agencies and must be appropriately cited for sustained operation of these shared resources. Users are obligated to fully acknowledge the facility and its funding source in formal publications and presentations containing data generated in the facility. We also appreciate receiving reprints or PDFs of such publications to use in our annual reports to internal and external funding agencies.
The authors acknowledge the Image Guided Radiation Core at UNMC which receives support through the following NIH S10 shared instrumentation grant (NIHS10OD023447-01A1). This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Rigor & Reproducibility Statement:
- Consult with the core staff in the planning stage. Consult with a statistician if you need help developing a Power Analysis to assure that your results will be adequately powered.
- Design your experiment with sufficient controls (rigor) and replicates (reproducibility).
- Assure that all of your reagents (antibodies, therapeutics, cell lines, mice) are fully validated.
- Have a clear and detailed protocol (standard operating procedures) and data analysis plan that can be easily followed. Assure that the protocol is strictly followed or that any deviation is well documented. Do not conduct any experiment that is not Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee approved. Additionally prior to using the core, our core Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee protocol must be added to your Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee through a change request.
- Assure that the staff or students performing the experiment are well trained and understand each step and the importance of performing them precisely (rigor). All training for animal procedures should be promptly documented in the Research Support System.
- The Small Animal Radiation Research Platform is well maintained. We have a service contract and a certified engineer calibrates the X-ray tube and CT once a year. In addition, we perform monthly checks on the X-ray tube voltage output and laser alignment. Comparative Medicine performs regular swipes for animal pathogens, and we have rigorous standard operating procedures for cleaning the machine and surfaces between experiments. We expect any instrumentation provided by the user is also well maintained and pathogen free.
Data Management & Sharing Statement
Data concerning the experimental setup (bed type, collimators, coordinates or tissue depth, dose, etc.) for radiation are maintained by the core for the purpose of experimental repetition or reference. Users may contact the core personnel if they require any details about radiation planning and delivery for publication or presentation.
Imaging data from CT are in dicom format and are much too large for the core to reasonably store for any length of time. If the user would like the dicom files, they should bring an appropriately large external hard drive to transfer the data. Data transfer can take several hours, so the user should expect to leave their hard drive overnight and pick it up the following day. If a user would like to generate an image using the core software this can be scheduled at the time of imaging, the time required to choose and generate the image will be included in the hourly rate.