Project Detail

In-Vivo Spectroscopy/Imaging System

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy

Lead: Jung, Ranu
Collaborators: Razdan, Anshuman;Moore, Michael;Myhaijlenko;Pauken, Christine;Vernon, Brent; Hu, Jiuxiang;He, Jiping;Helms-Tillery, Steve;
Sponsor: NIH Instrumentation Grant
Date: 07/01/2004  - 06/30/2005
Web site: http://knet.asu.edu/research/?getObject=asulib:66609

Abstract

With recent genetic and molecular advances, small animal (rat/mice) models of human disease have become increasingly important resources for the investigation of the underlying mechanisms of disease. Many traditional investigational approaches require sacrificing the animals for ex vivo tissue and molecular analysis. This prevents the researchers from observing in vivo the natural or perturbed evolution of the processes under study.

Screen shots showing image of an egg cell looking from outside (topleft), viewing volume with apex of the green pyramid as the user position (top right), a particular view of the cell where green is MAP Kinase, red is Cyclin B1 and the blue is the DNA (bottom left) and, donut shape of DNA emerging as a result of 3D volume visualization which the cell biologist would have been unable to detect before (bottom right).

One approach for bioimaging is to use nuclear magnetic resonance. The PharmaScan 70116 7.0 Tesla, 90 cm clear bore system from Bruker-Biospin is a multipurpose research scanner for high resolution, fast speed, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance 2D and 3D image reconstruction and in vivo spectroscopy. Applications range from assessing effects of chemotherapy for tumors, to developing, testing, and implementing noninvasive, brain-imaging indicators of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) in double transgenic mice containing AD genes, to assessment of CNS neuroplasticity after spinal cord injury or stroke.

PharmaScan MRI System for Pharmaceutical Industry and Biotechnology Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of laboratory animals has been established in a multitude of biological and pharmacological applications and already has become the accepted gold standard in several of them. Read more...

The segmentation of linear structures in a gray-scale image is widely used in a variety of image analysis and visualization tasks. In case of biomedical image analysis of volumetric data (such as CT or MRI scans), it is very common that a linear structure (blood vessel) is attached to a sheet-shaped (planar) and/or blob-shaped (ellipsoid) region (large tissue or fluid mass such as cistern basin in the brain) but where the image intensity of both structures is the same. Segmentation algorithms (threshold based or statistical approaches) are unable to clearly define and therefore segment the areas of such attachment. Automatic detection of the attachment and locating the start and end of linear structures is important for visualization and quantification in biomedical analysis.

Meiotic microtubule spindle fibers of a mouse egg. (a) Volume rendering of the spindle fibers. (b) Surface rendering of the original data. (c) Surface rendering of the spindle fibers enhanced by multiscale line filtering. (d) Surface rendering of the spindle fibers extracted by applying our new method.