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Radiation treatment of cancer induces an optical Čerenkov emission throughout the treated volume, which could be used to excite molecular reporters in vivo, allowing molecular sensing of tissue response during fractionated therapy. In this letter, the idea that spatial mapping of this signal can be achieved with tomographic recovery of the fluorophore distribution is tested for the first time, using 6 MeV photons from a linear accelerator in a heterogeneous tissue phantom. Čerenkov light excited fluorophore throughout the tissue phantom, and diffuse tomography was used to recover images. Measurements from13 locations were used, with spectrometer detection and spectral fitting, to separate the fluorophore emission from the Čerenkov continuum. Fluorescent diffuse tomographic images showed a linear response between the concentration and the reconstructed values. The potential to apply this molecular imaging in treatment with molecular reporters appears promising.

Raman spectroscopy is used to gather information on the mineral and organic components of bone tissue to analyze their composition. By measuring the Raman signal of bone through spatially offset Raman spectroscopy the health of the bone can be determined. We’ve customized a system with 8 collection channels that consist of individual fibers, which are coupled to separate spectrometers and cooled CCDs. This parallel detection system was used to scan gelatin phantoms with Teflon inclusions of two sizes. Raman signals were decoupled from the autofluorescence background using channel specific polynomial fitting. Images with high contrast to background ratios of Raman yield and accurate spatial resolution were recovered using a model-based diffuse tomography approach.

Abstract. The ability to image targeted tracer binding to epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) was studied in vivo in orthotopically grown glioma tumors of different sizes. The binding potential was quantified using a dualtracer approach, which employs a fluorescently labeled peptide targeted to EGFR and a reference tracer with similar pharmacokinetic properties but no specific binding, to estimate the relative bound fraction from kinetic compartment modeling. The recovered values of binding potential did not vary significantly as a function of tumor size (1 to 33 mm 3 ), suggesting that binding potential may be consistent in the U251 tumors regardless of size or stage after implantation. However, the fluorescence yield of the targeted fluorescent tracers in the tumor was affected significantly by tumor size, suggesting that dual-tracer imaging helps account for variations in absolute uptake, which plague single-tracer imaging techniques. Ex vivo analysis showed relatively high spatial heterogeneity in each tumor that cannot be resolved by tomographic techniques. Nonetheless, the dual-tracer tomographic technique is a powerful tool for longitudinal bulk estimation of receptor binding. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.

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