In Vivo Molecular Imaging of Cancer in Small Animals

描述（由申请人提供）：小鼠癌症模型现在在制定癌症发生和转移的现代概念中具有重要作用，并为我们提供了开发和评估新的诊断和治疗技术的现实手段。 此外，用于操纵基因组的转基因和敲除技术使我们能够定制精确再现人类肿瘤发生以及癌症生物学及其遗传基础的动物模型。 随着人类疾病模型的数量和重要性不断增加，特别是在小鼠和大鼠等较小动物中，高分辨率核医学技术提供独特信息的潜力对许多研究人员来说变得越来越明显。 核医学程序的关键优势在于它们允许非侵入性地获得功能信息，因此可以重复研究每个动物。 因此，很明显，小动物的核医学成像是非常可取的。 由于这些原因，核成像技术（如SPECT）正在成为强大的新工具，在小型实验室动物的生物过程成像。 然而，这些应用对小动物放射性核素成像的需求是显著的。 放射性核素成像系统必须提供1-2 mm或更好的空间分辨率，并具有出色的检测效率，以便可以在合理的时间内完成研究，同时具有少量的放射性和不干扰生物模型的辐射剂量。 提出的研究的目标是研究一种新的探测器设计，以建立一个高性能的小动物SPECT系统。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Murine models of cancer now have an essential role in formulating modern concepts of carcinogenesis and metastasis, and provide us with a realistic means of developing and evaluating new diagnostic and therapeutic techniques. Moreover, transgenic and knock-out techniques for manipulating the genome allow us to tailor animal models that accurately recapitulate human tumorigenesis as well as cancer biology and its genetic underpinnings. With the ever-increasing number and importance of human disease models, particularly in the smaller animals such as mice and rats, the potential of high-resolution nuclear medicine technologies to contribute unique information is becoming apparent to many researchers. The critical advantage of nuclear medicine procedures is that they allow functional information to be obtained noninvasively, so each animal can be studied repeatedly. Thus, it is clear that nuclear medicine imaging of small animals is highly desirable. For these reasons, nuclear imaging techniques (such as SPECT) are becoming powerful new tools in imaging biological processes in small laboratory animals. However, the demands on small animal radionuclide imaging for these applications are significant. The radionuclide imaging system must offer spatial resolution in the range of 1-2 mm or better, and with excellent detection efficiency so that the study can be completed in reasonable time with small amounts of radioactivity and with radiation doses that do not perturb the biological model. The goal of the proposed research is to investigate a novel detector design to build a high performance small animal SPECT system.