A Comparison Between a Time Domain and Continuous Wave Small Animal Optical Imaging System

We present a phantom study to evaluate the performance of the eXplore Optix (Advanced Research Technologies-GE Healthcare), the first commercially available time-domain tomography system for small animal fluorescence imaging, and compare its capabilities with the widely used IVIS 200 (Xenogen Corporation-Caliper) continuous wave planar imaging system. The eXplore Optix, based on point-wise illumination and collection scheme, is found to be a log order more sensitive with significantly higher detection depth and spatial resolution as compared with the wide-area illumination IVIS 200 under the conditions tested. A time-resolved detection system allows the eXplore Optix to measure the arrival time distribution of fluorescence photons. This enables fluorescence lifetime measurement, absorption mapping, and estimation of fluorescent inclusion depth, which in turn is used by a reconstruction algorithm to calculate the volumetric distribution of the fluorophore concentration. An increased acquisition time and lack of ability to image multiple animals simultaneously are the main drawbacks of the eXplore Optix as compared with the IVIS 200.

[1]  F Lesage,et al.  Time Domain Fluorescent Diffuse Optical Tomography: analytical expressions. , 2005, Optics express.

[2]  A. Hielscher,et al.  Instrumentation for fast functional optical tomography , 2002 .

[3]  F. Lesage,et al.  Whole-body fluorescence lifetime imaging of a tumor-targeted near-infrared molecular probe in mice. , 2005, Journal of biomedical optics.

[4]  J. Siegel,et al.  Imaging the environment of green fluorescent protein. , 2002, Biophysical journal.

[5]  H. Shimada,et al.  Whole-body optical imaging of green fluorescent protein-expressing tumors and metastases. , 2000, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[6]  Harvey R Herschman,et al.  Molecular Imaging: Looking at Problems, Seeing Solutions , 2003, Science.

[7]  S. Gambhir,et al.  Molecular imaging in living subjects: seeing fundamental biological processes in a new light. , 2003, Genes & development.

[8]  S. Nie,et al.  In vivo cancer targeting and imaging with semiconductor quantum dots , 2004, Nature Biotechnology.

[9]  R. Weissleder,et al.  Experimental three-dimensional fluorescence reconstruction of diffuse media by use of a normalized Born approximation. , 2001, Optics letters.

[10]  T. Vo‐Dinh,et al.  Optical Properties of Tissue , 2003 .

[11]  Alfano,et al.  When does the diffusion approximation fail to describe photon transport in random media? , 1990, Physical review letters.

[12]  R Weissleder,et al.  Near-infrared optical imaging of protease activity for tumor detection. , 1999, Radiology.

[13]  Jan Siegel,et al.  Time-domain fluorescence lifetime imaging applied to biological tissue , 2004, Photochemical & photobiological sciences : Official journal of the European Photochemistry Association and the European Society for Photobiology.

[14]  M. Eppstein,et al.  Three-dimensional fluorescence lifetime tomography. , 2005, Medical physics.

[15]  M. Eppstein,et al.  Fluorescence-enhanced optical imaging in large tissue volumes using a gain-modulated ICCD camera. , 2003, Physics in medicine and biology.

[16]  E. Sevick-Muraca,et al.  Near-Infrared Fluorescence Optical Imaging and Tomography , 2004, Disease markers.

[17]  Eva M Sevick-Muraca,et al.  Three-dimensional fluorescence enhanced optical tomography using referenced frequency-domain photon migration measurements at emission and excitation wavelengths. , 2002, Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision.

[18]  D. Boas,et al.  Fluorescence lifetime imaging in turbid media. , 1996, Optics letters.

[19]  Eddy Kuwana,et al.  Fluorescence lifetime spectroscopy for pH sensing in scattering media. , 2003, Analytical chemistry.

[20]  Vasilis Ntziachristos,et al.  A submillimeter resolution fluorescence molecular imaging system for small animal imaging. , 2003, Medical physics.

[21]  S. Arridge,et al.  Nonuniqueness in diffusion-based optical tomography. , 1998, Optics letters.

[22]  S R Arridge,et al.  Recent advances in diffuse optical imaging , 2005, Physics in medicine and biology.

[23]  Vasilis Ntziachristos,et al.  Shedding light onto live molecular targets , 2003, Nature Medicine.

[24]  Eva M. Sevick-Muraca,et al.  Sensitivity and Depth Penetration of Continuous Wave Versus Frequency-domain Photon Migration Near-infrared Fluorescence Contrast–enhanced Imaging¶ , 2003 .

[25]  R Esposito,et al.  Depth dependence of the analytical expression for the width of the point spread function (spatial resolution) in time-resolved transillumination. , 2001, Journal of biomedical optics.

[26]  Andreas H Hielscher,et al.  Optical tomographic imaging of small animals. , 2005, Current opinion in biotechnology.

[27]  Vasilis Ntziachristos,et al.  Looking and listening to light: the evolution of whole-body photonic imaging , 2005, Nature Biotechnology.