Deep Tissue Functional Imaging

Visualization of tumors and proteomic profiling of their microenvironment will shed more light on how tumors develop and evolve, and provide valuable insights into soluble signals that promote aggressive phenotype and metastasis.  Functional imaging techniques such as MRI, PET has advanced our knowledge of many diseases.  In our laboratory we use a fluorescence transillumination technique called Fluorescence Molecular Tomography (FMT) to gain temporal information on tumor development and map the proteomic signature of the tumor. Primary advantages of FMT are ability to detect events and molecules at pico-molar concentrations and get a 3D map of the information with accurate anatomical positioning.  The latter can be further improved by registering FMT data sets with other imaging modalities like micro-CT and by using image priors to improve the accuracy of the FMT reconstruction. Click the video to watch a FMT/micro-CT co-registered 3D rendering showing skeletal features in a rat subject. The micro-CT (grey) shows the entire skeleton, while the FMT (NIH color scheme) identifies areas of freshly deposited bone (Vonwil et al. (2013)). Additionally, we employ FMT/micro-CT to study the biodistribution of nanoparticulate agents developed in house for multimodal imaging and drug delivery.    
Copyright - Shastrilab, All Rights Reserved

Copyright - Shastrilab, All Rights Reserved