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形成癌症发生和转移的现代概念方面具有重要作用，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，用于操作基因组的转基因和敲除技术使我们能够量身定做动物模型，准确地概括人类肿瘤发生以及癌症生物学及其遗传基础。 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的动物中，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是，它们允许以非侵入性方式获得功能信息，因此每种动物都可以进行重复研究。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)正在成为对小型实验室动物的生物过程进行成像的强有力的新工具。然而，这些应用对小动物放射性核素成像的需求是巨大的。放射性核素成像系统必须在1-2毫米或更好的范围内提供空间分辨率，并具有良好的探测效率，以便在合理的时间内以少量的放射性和不干扰生物模型的辐射剂量完成研究。本研究的目的是探索一种新的探测器设计，以构建高性能的小动物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.