Phenotyping of Mice Using Bioimaging

目标是让候选人通过获得生物医学科学的关键知识和技能来实现职业转型，并成为新兴生物医学领域富有成效和成功的调查员，拥有独特的专业知识。其中一个重要组成部分是利用体内生物成像技术对小动物进行遗传表型分析的项目。这项研究将首先解决技术上更容易的问题，即测量和分析小鼠的局部脂肪分布，以确定具有特定健康问题的潜在亚组;例如，内脏脂肪水平的增加与胰岛素抵抗、心血管疾病和其它代谢综合征有关。 在此经验的基础上，该项目将继续使用3D显微CT成像来识别骨骼表型。不仅图像分割是一个挑战，还将创建一个用于提取复杂解剖信息的范例，例如从小鼠骨骼中提取，并将数据聚类为表型以与基因型进行比较。这一范例将为从小鼠模型中获得生物医学知识设定一个标准，并开辟新的可能性。

The goal is for the candidate to embark on a career transformation by acquiring critical knowledge and skills in biomedical sciences and become a productive and successful investigator in emerging biomedical areas with a unique set of expertises. One of the important components consists of projects in genetic phenotyping of small animals using in vivo bioimaging. The research will first tackle the technically easier problem of measuring and analyzing regional fat distribution in mice so as to identify potential subgroups with specific health problems; e.g., increased levels of visceral fat have been associated with insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, and other metabolic syndromes. Building on this experience, the project will proceed to the identification of skeletal phenotypes using 3D micro-CT imaging. Not only will image segmentation be a challenge, a paradigm for extracting complex anatomical information will be created, as for example from a mouse skeleton, and clustering data into phenotypes for comparison with genotypes. This paradigm will set a standard and open new possibilities in deriving biomedical knowledge from mouse models.