The CREF collaborates with the Santa Lucia IRCCS FSL Foundation within a joint and equal research platform, coordinated by CREF Researcher Federico Giove. The Foundation is a Scientific Hospitalization and Treatment Institute, home to highly specialized clinical activities in the treatment of neurological pathologies and neurorehabilitation after brain trauma or insults. The Santa Lucia Foundation treats over 2000 hospitalisations (in addition to outpatient activity) and is home to intense research activity. The joint research platform, based at Santa Lucia,  is dedicated to basic and clinical research in neuroscience and neuroimaging, and is aimed at developing and applying new Magnetic Resonance technologies. As part of the platform activities, CREF and FSL researchers collaborate in close contact with the clinical activities to maximise the research’s translational value.

CREF has a dedicated laboratory within the platform: NaN (Neurophysics and Neuroimaging). Research activities involve around 50 researchers from various public and private institutions and can count on cutting-edge experimental infrastructures. In particular, a Siemens Prisma 3T MRI scanner is available, dedicated exclusively to research. It is the scanner with highest performance currently available 64 RF channels, gradients 80 mT/m @ 200 T/m/s, highly homogeneous magnet). Advanced, non-commercial MRI sequences are available, based on research agreements with important international institutions (Harvard Medical School, University of Minneapolis, University of California San Diego). Tools for programming pulse sequences are available, as well as the required skills and qualifications. Finally, all the auxiliary tools necessary for monitoring volunteers and carrying out complex functional studies are available on the platform. The platform also has complete IT facilities. These include distributed processing (grid based computing optimized for neuroimaging, over 140 nodes) and a comprehensive database for neuroimaging data integrated with central storage on 200 TB online SAN RAID, of which approximately 10% on SSD. The database currently contains neuroimages of approximately 14,000 patients.