Animal imaging in preclinical studies is used to visualize changes at organs, tissue or at a molecular level during drug development. Imaging modalities like micro-PET, MRI and CT allow non-invasive longitudinal studies of animal models.
We are a member of the BMBF network project "Molecular Imaging in Medicine (MoBiMed) - Mechanism of targeting Angiogenesis for Diagnostics and Therapy" funded by the german government. Our part in this research project consortium is concerned with imaging applications of tumor angiogenesis. Using multi-modal acquisition techniques, tumor growth and marker specificity is evaluated and analysed.
For this project, we have developed an imaging platform for the visualization and processing of DICOM or proprietary animal image formats of different in-vivo scanners. It also supports tumor segmentation and fusion technques for different modalities.
- Automatic and semi-automatic tumor segmentation
- 4D ROI propagation
- SUV analysis
- Plot SUV curves
- Export to office (generic csv)
- Image visualization platform
- Supports DICOM, mhd (raw), hdr and many more image formats
- Implementation of custom specific image reader on request
- Rigid and non-rigid image registration
- Fusion of PET, MR, CT and SPECT animal images
- Multi-modal ROI propagation; transfer a ROI to another image or modality
- Image database manager to organize your studies
Tumor Segmentation
- The blue contour in the top images shows a segmented tumor in a PET image. A single click inside the tumor is sufficient to compute a ROI of the tumor for an automated 4-D SUV analysis.
- Generate a 3-D ROI of the tumor with a single click
- Allows ROI refinement by the user
- Create the tumor ROI inside the PET image and use it for a quantitative analysis in another modality like FBP reconstruction
- Evaluate your study in minutes using automatic tumor segmentation and SUV measurement
- Accelerate your research
- Propagate a 3-D ROI through a temporal image sequence
- Imaging of tumor angiogenesis
- Analyze tumor growth and marker specificity
Automated SUV Analysis
The left plot shows a comparison between a manual- and an automated tumor segmentation used for a SUV analysis. The tumor ROI is used to compute mean standardized uptake values in a 4-D PET image. Each single curve represents an average of three different animal studies. The specificity of the radiopharmaceutical is evaluated by comparing a control to a blocking angiogenesis study. The manual anti-angiogenesis study takes several hours, while the automated evaluation takes only minutes providing comparable results.
