Spinoza Centre

The Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging is a collaboration between the KNAW – Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, the Vrije University Amsterdam, and Amsterdam UMC – locations AMC and VUmc. The Spinoza Centre offers its ultrasensitive MRI-scanners to more than four hundred researchers in the Amsterdam region for their fundamental research into the workings of the brain and brain disorders.

Research area

The research of the Spinoza Centre is focused on:

• Cognition (research into the brain’s information processing)
• Clinical science (research into clinical disorders)
• Methods (development of data acquisition and analyses techniques)

Imaging the brain

The Spinoza Centre houses one 3 Tesla scanners and one ultra high-field 7 Tesla MRI-scanner. Currently only four human 7 Tesla MRI scanners are operational in the Netherlands. The 7T MRI scanner visualizes the brain at unprecedented high sensitivity, in terms of function, anatomy and metabolism in the living human brain.

The Spinoza Centre collaborates with several national and international research institutes and companies, for example the University Medical Centers of Leiden and Utrecht and Groningen

The Spinoza Centre has been supported in part by a grant from the European Fund for Regional Development (EFRO) and by contributions by the Municipality of Amsterdam and the Province of North Holland.