ANSTO's research capabilities, led by the OPAL nuclear research reactor and associated instruments provide access to users investigating areas as diverse as materials, life sciences, climate change and mining/engineering.
The development of dual-mice acquisitions
Quantification of dual-mice acquisitions and blood signal extraction
A core activity of ANSTO LifeSciences is the development of new PET radiotracers, essentially for clinical applications in neurology and oncology. In vivo imaging is a crucial tool in the process of characterising the best radiotracers and following up disease progression through its ability to accurately map and quantify the radiotracer pharmaco-kinetics in rodents. In order to improve the cost effectiveness of our pre-clinical imaging platform, we have developed a bed that can hold two mice.
This project aims to achieve a reliable quantification of the kinetics of in vivo whole-body investigation of the mouse, in a dual-bed framework. Two factors play an important role in the quantification process of PET investigation, firstly the accuracy of the correction methods applied during the reconstruction process, such as the attenuation, scatter, dead time corrections and resolution recovery, and secondly, the extraction of the kinetics from the data collected during the in vivo experiment.
This work is being completed using both experimental and simulated data. Simulated data are obtained using the PET-SORTEO Monte Carlo based simulator.
The image shows the results obtained during a pilot study.
We are also looking at different ways to extract blood signals from an image using both experimental and simulated data, particularly in case of mouse studies where blood sampling is almost impossible, mainly due to a reduced blood volume. |  |