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效荧光剂的可用性不断增加，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，能够准确地在三维中分辨并量化这种荧光染料在致密组织中的生物分布。整个动物和组织的荧光宏观观察是成像科学中最具挑战性和尚未开发的领域，其全部潜力远未达到。该提案提出开发一种混合FMT系统，该系统结合了光学断层扫描和高分辨率x射线计算机断层扫描的最新发展，为小动物成像提供前所未有的成像能力。提出的系统是一个全新的设计，假设完整的投影（360度）照明和检测，类似于x射线CT的几何实践。CCD相机用于在没有先前使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，与以前的实现相比，所提出的设计和方法不仅仅是一个渐进的步骤，而是在性能和实验简单性方面提供了新一代。虽然我们期望这项技术在许多小动物成像应用中得到应用，但我们对将其应用于改善癌症小鼠模型的成像特别感兴趣。我们假设，所提出的发展将产生一个实用和高效的系统，可以成为许多临床前研究中涉及整个动物体内成像的选择方法。

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.