• BMB Reports
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• v.55 no.6
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• pp.267-274
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• 2022

Molecular imaging is used to improve the disease diagnosis, prognosis, monitoring of treatment in living subjects. Numerous molecular targets have been developed for various cellular and molecular processes in genetic, metabolic, proteomic, and cellular biologic level. Molecular imaging modalities such as Optical Imaging, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT), and Computed Tomography (CT) can be used to visualize anatomic, genetic, biochemical, and physiologic changes in vivo. For in vivo cell imaging, certain cells such as cancer cells, immune cells, stem cells could be labeled by direct and indirect labeling methods to monitor cell migration, cell activity, and cell effects in cell-based therapy. In case of cancer, it could be used to investigate biological processes such as cancer metastasis and to analyze the drug treatment process. In addition, transplanted stem cells and immune cells in cell-based therapy could be visualized and tracked to confirm the fate, activity, and function of cells. In conventional molecular imaging, cells can be monitored in vivo in bulk non-invasively with optical imaging, MRI, PET, and SPECT imaging. However, single cell imaging in vivo has been a great challenge due to an extremely high sensitive detection of single cell. Recently, there has been great attention for in vivo single cell imaging due to the development of single cell study. In vivo single imaging could analyze the survival or death, movement direction, and characteristics of a single cell in live subjects. In this article, we reviewed basic principle of in vivo molecular imaging and introduced recent studies for in vivo single cell imaging based on the concept of in vivo molecular imaging.

• IMMUNE NETWORK
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.223-229
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• 2012

Clinical and preclinical in vivo immune cell imaging approaches have been used to study immune cell proliferation, apoptosis and interaction at the microscopic (intra-vital imaging) and macroscopic (whole-body imaging) level by use of ex vivo or in vivo labeling method. A series of imaging techniques ranging from non-radiation based techniques such as optical imaging, MRI, and ultrasound to radiation based CT/nuclear imaging can be used for in vivo immune cell tracking. These imaging modalities highlight the intrinsic behavior of different immune cell populations in physiological context. Fluorescent, radioactive or paramagnetic probes can be used in direct labeling protocols to monitor the specific cell population. Reporter genes can also be used for genetic, indirect labeling protocols to track the fate of a given cell subpopulation in vivo. In this review, we summarized several methods dealing with dendritic cell, macrophage, and T lymphocyte specifically labeled for different macroscopic whole-body imaging techniques both for the study of their physiological function and in the context of immunotherapy to exploit imaging-derived information and immune-based treatments.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 2011.06a
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• pp.1601-1602
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• 2011

• Journal of the Korean Society of Visualization
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.9-14
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• 2014

Two-photon microscopy (TPM) has been used in plant research as a high-resolution high-depth 3D imaging modality. However, TPM is known to induce photo-damage to the plant in case of long time exposure, and optimal excitation wavelength for plant imaging has not been investigated. Longer excitation wavelength may be appropriate for in vivo two-photon imaging of Arabidopsis thaliana leaves, and effects of longer excitation wavelength were investigated in terms of imaging depth, emission spectrum. Changes of emission spectrum as a function of exposure time at longer excitation wavelength were measured for in vivo longitudinal imaging. Imaging depth was not changed much probably because photon scattering at the cell wall was a limiting factor. Chloroplast emission spectrum showed its intensity peak shift by 20 nm with transition of excitation wavelength from 849 nm or below to 850 nm or higher. Emission spectrum showed different change patterns with excitation wavelengths in longitudinal imaging. Longer excitation wavelengths appeared to interact with chloroplasts differently in comparison with 780 nm excitation wavelength, and may be good for in vivo imaging.

• Biomolecules & Therapeutics
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.81-92
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• 2018

It is widely accepted that altered metabolism contributes to cancer growth and has been described as a hallmark of cancer. Our view and understanding of cancer metabolism has expanded at a rapid pace, however, there remains a need to study metabolic dependencies of human cancer in vivo. Recent studies have sought to utilize multi-modality imaging (MMI) techniques in order to build a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of cancer metabolism. MMI combines several in vivo techniques that can provide complementary information related to cancer metabolism. We describe several non-invasive imaging techniques that provide both anatomical and functional information related to tumor metabolism. These imaging modalities include: positron emission tomography (PET), computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) that uses hyperpolarized probes and optical imaging utilizing bioluminescence and quantification of light emitted. We describe how these imaging modalities can be combined with mass spectrometry and quantitative immunochemistry to obtain more complete picture of cancer metabolism. In vivo studies of tumor metabolism are emerging in the field and represent an important component to our understanding of how metabolism shapes and defines cancer initiation, progression and response to treatment. In this review we describe in vivo based studies of cancer metabolism that have taken advantage of MMI in both pre-clinical and clinical studies. MMI promises to advance our understanding of cancer metabolism in both basic research and clinical settings with the ultimate goal of improving detection, diagnosis and treatment of cancer patients.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.177-186
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• 2010

In 3D ultrasound color Doppler imaging (CDI), 8-16 pulse transmissions (ensembles) per each scanline are used for effective clutter rejection and flow estimation, but it yields a low volume acquisition rate. In this paper, we have evaluated three flow estimation methods: autoregression (AR), eigendecomposition (ED), and autocorrelation combined with adaptive clutter rejection (AC-ACR) for a small ensemble size (E=4). The performance of AR, ED and AC-ACR methods was compared using 2D and 3D in vivo data acquired under different clutter conditions (common carotid artery, kidney and liver). To evaluate the effectiveness of three methods, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were generated. For 2D kidney in vivo data, the AC-ACR method outperforms the AR and ED methods in terms of the area under the ROC curve (AUC) (0.852 vs. 0.793 and 0.813, respectively). Similarly, the AC-ACR method shows higher AUC values for 2D liver in vivo data compared to the AR and ED methods (0.855 vs. 0.807 and 0.823, respectively). For the common carotid artery data, the AR provides higher AUC values, but it suffers from biased estimates. For 3D in vivo data acquired from a kidney transplant patient, the AC-ACR with E=4 provides an AUC value of 0.799. These in vivo experiment results indicate that the AC-ACR method can provide more robust flow estimates compared to the AR and ED methods with a small ensemble size.

• Biomedical Science Letters
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.23-31
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• 2015

Recently, specific antibodies have been used extensively to diagnose and treat various diseases. It is essential to assess the efficacy and specificity of antibodies, especially the in vivo environment. Anti-HER-2/neu mAb was evaluated as a possible transporting agent for radioimmunotherapy. The monoclonal antibody was successfully radio-labeled with $^{131}I$. In vitro binding assays were performed to confirm its targeting ability using another radio-iodine, $^{125}I$. Binding percentage of $^{125}I$ labeled anti-HER-2/neu mAb in HER-2/neu expressing CT-26 cells was found to be 4.5%, whereas the binding percentage of $^{125}I$ labeled anti-HER-2/neu mAb in wild-type CT-26 was only 0.45%. In vivo images were obtained and analyzed through $\gamma$-camera and an optical fluorescent modality, IVIS-200. $\gamma$-camera images showed that $^{131}I$ labeled anti-HER-2/neu mAb accumulated in HER-2/neu CT-26 tumors. Optical imaging based on near infrared fluorescence labeled anti-HER-2/neu mAb showed higher fluorescence intensities in HER-2/neu CT-26 tumors than in wild-type CT-26 tumors. Anti-HER-2/neu mAb was found to specifically bind to its receptor expressing tumor. Our study demonstrates that in vivo imaging technique is a useful method for the evaluation of an antibody's therapeutic and diagnostic potentials.

• Parasites, Hosts and Diseases
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• v.54 no.2
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• pp.225-231
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• 2016

Human and animal alveolar echinococcosis (AE) are important helminth infections endemic in wide areas of the Northern hemisphere. Monitoring Echinococcus multilocularis viability and spread using real-time fluorescent imaging in vivo provides a fast method to evaluate the load of parasite. Here, we generated a kind of fluorescent protoscolices in vivo imaging model and utilized this model to assess the activity against E. multilocularis protoscolices of metformin (Met). Results indicated that JC-1 tagged E. multilocularis can be reliably and confidently used to monitor protoscolices in vitro and in vivo. The availability of this transient in vivo fluorescent imaging of E. multilocularis protoscolices constitutes an important step toward the long term bio-imaging research of the AE-infected mouse models. In addition, this will be of great interest for further research on infection strategies and development of drugs and vaccines against E. multilocularis and other cestodes.

• Journal of the Optical Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.300-304
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• 2011

Optical microscopes are widely used for medical imaging these days, but biopsy is a lengthy process that causes many problems during the ex-vivo imaging procedure. The endo-microscope has been studied to increase accessibility to the human body and to get in-vivo images to use for medical diagnosis. This research proposes a multi-modal confocal endo-microscope for bio-medical imaging. We introduce the design process for a small endoscopic probe and a coupling mechanism for the probe to make the multi-modal confocal endo-microscope. The endoscopic probe was designed to decrease chromatic and spherical aberrations, which deteriorate the images obtained with the conventional GRIN lens. Fluorescence and reflectance images of various samples were obtained with the proposed endo-microscope. We evaluated the performance of the proposed endo-microscope by analyzing the acquired images, and demonstrate the possibilities of in-vivo medical imaging for early diagnosis.

• Bioinformatics and Biosystems
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.17-27
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• 2006

Recent progress in the development of non-invasive imaging technologies continues to strengthen the role of molecular imaging biological research. These tools have been validated recently in variety of research models, and have been shown to provide continuous quantitative monitoring of the location(s), magnitude, and time-variation of gene delivery and/or expression. This article reviews the use of radionuclide, magnetic resonance, and optical imaging technologies as they have been used in imaging gene delivery and gene expression for molecular imaging applications. The studies published to date demonstrate that noninvasive imaging tools will help to accelerate pre-clinical model validation as well as allow for clinical monitoring of human diseases.