Optical Molecular Brain Imaging (Charité)
Recently a novel imaging approach ‘Fluorescence Tomography’ (FT) has been established for small animals (Ntziachristos et al., 2002) for the assessment of tumor metabolism. Such a technique lends itself to the growing field of molecular imaging, a term highlighting the need for physiological specificity of modern imaging techniques. Here, an improved technological approach is sketched to be fully designed for a 3D-FT in stroke models within the BNIC.
For optical fluorescence tomography, excitation light in the region of 650 to 700nm is brought to the tissue and fluorescent radiation is detected at a certain distance to the incidence location. In the current tomographic approach (Ntziachristos et al., 2002) the animal is placed in a cylinder filled with a scattering fluid. This standardized geometry favors simple algorithms for 3D reconstruction of the fluorophore concentration. Our approach tries to overcome the limitedapplicability and moderate spatial resolution of such a set-up. We therefore place the light source directly on the tissue under investigation. This, however, necessitates more elaborate computational algorithms. Therefore we plan to use 3D structural MRI data in the implementation of the forward model and thereby to stabilize the reconstruction process.
For more details on our technology please see the project core 4 . For more details on the applications please visit the experimental neurology at the Charite .
