Hybrid Complete Protection Flourescence Molecular Tomography and X-ray CT

描述（由申请人提供）：用于报告体内功能和分子组织过程的强大荧光剂的日益增加的可用性为检测疾病、表征细胞和亚细胞过程以及评估治疗效果开辟了新的途径。随着可视化能力的提高，迫切需要高度先进的成像技术，该技术可以准确地在三维空间中分辨并量化这种荧光染料通过致密组织的生物分布。整个动物和组织的荧光显微镜检查是成像科学中最具挑战性且仍在很大程度上未被探索的领域，其全部潜力远未达到。该提案提出开发一种混合FMT系统，该系统将光学断层扫描的最先进的当前发展与高分辨率X射线计算机断层扫描相结合，为小动物成像提供前所未有的成像能力。所提出的系统是一种全新的设计，它假设完全投影（360度）照明和检测，类似于X射线CT中看到的几何实践。CCD照相机用于在没有先前利用的与组织物理接触的匹配流体或纤维的情况下获得高空间采样光子收集。因此，所提出的设计和方法与以前的实现相比不仅仅是一个渐进的进步，而是在性能和实验简单性方面提供了新一代。虽然我们预计该技术将在许多小动物成像中得到应用，但我们特别感兴趣的是将其应用于改善小鼠癌症模型的成像。我们假设，拟议的发展将产生一个实用和高效的系统，可以成为一种方法的选择，在许多临床前研究，涉及在体内成像的整个动物。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The increasing availability of powerful fluorescent agents for reporting on functional and molecular tissue processes in-vivo opens new ways for detecting disease, characterizing cellular and sub-cellular processes and for assessing the effects of treatments. With this increased capacity for visualization conies a pressing need for highly advanced imaging technology that can accurately resolve in three dimensions and quantify the bio-distribution of such fluorochromes through dense tissues. Fluorescence macroscopy of entire animals and tissues is a most challenging and still largely unexplored field of imaging sciences, whose full potential is far from being reached. This proposal offers to develop a hybrid FMT system that combines the most advanced current developments on optical tomography with high-resolution X-ray Computed Tomography to offer unprecedented imaging capacity for small animal imaging. The system proposed is a fundamentally new design that assumes complete projection (360 degrees) illumination and detection, similarly to geometrical practices seen in X-ray CT. A CCD camera is used for obtaining high spatial sampling photon collection in the absence of previously utilized matching fluids or fibers in physical contact with tissue. As such, the proposed design and methods are not simply an incremental step forward compared to previous implementations but offer a new generation in terms of performance and experimental simplicity. While we expect the technology to find many small animal imaging applications, we are particularly interested in applying it for improving imaging in mouse models of cancer. We hypothesize that the proposed developments will yield a practical and highly efficient system that can become a method of choice in many preclinical studies involving in-vivo imaging of entire animals.