Dynamic contrast-enhanced optical imaging of in vivo organ function.

Conventional approaches to optical small animal molecular imaging suffer from poor resolution, limited sensitivity, and unreliable quantitation, often reducing their utility in practice. We previously demonstrated that the in vivo dynamics of an injected contrast agent could be exploited to provide high-contrast anatomical registration, owing to the temporal differences in each organ's response to the circulating fluorophore. This study extends this approach to explore whether dynamic contrast-enhanced optical imaging (DyCE) can allow noninvasive, in vivo assessment of organ function by quantifying the differing cellular uptake or wash-out dynamics of an agent in healthy and damaged organs.

In vivo optical imaging and dynamic contrast methods for biomedical research.

This paper provides an overview of optical imaging methods commonly applied to basic research applications. Optical imaging is well suited for non-clinical use, since it can exploit an enormous range of endogenous and exogenous forms of contrast that provide information about the structure and function of tissues ranging from single cells to entire organisms. An additional benefit of optical imaging that is often under-exploited is its ability to acquire data at high speeds; a feature that enables it to not only observe static distributions of contrast, but to probe and characterize dynamic events related to physiology, disease progression and acute interventions in real time.