Department of Radiation Oncology, Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford, California, United States of America.
Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Davis, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Jul 7;15(7):e0221241. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0221241. eCollection 2020.
Radioluminescence microscopy (RLM) is an imaging technique that allows quantitative analysis of clinical radiolabeled drugs and probes in single cells. However, the modality suffers from slow data acquisition (15-30 minutes), thus critically affecting experiments with short-lived radioactive drugs. To overcome this issue, we suggest an approach that significantly accelerates data collection. Instead of using a single scintillator to image the decay of radioactive molecules, we sandwiched the radiolabeled cells between two scintillators. As proof of concept, we imaged cells labeled with [18F]FDG, a radioactive glucose popularly used in oncology to image tumors. Results show that the double scintillator configuration increases the microscope sensitivity by two-fold, thus reducing the image acquisition time by half to achieve the same result as the single scintillator approach. The experimental results were also compared with Geant4 Monte Carlo simulation to confirm the two-fold increase in sensitivity with only minor degradation in spatial resolution. Overall, these findings suggest that the double scintillator configuration can be used to perform time-sensitive studies such as cell pharmacokinetics or cell uptake of short-lived radiotracers.
放射发光显微镜（RLM）是一种成像技术，可对临床放射性标记药物和探针进行单细胞的定量分析。然而，该技术存在数据采集缓慢的问题（15-30 分钟），这对使用半衰期短的放射性药物的实验产生了严重影响。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了一种可以显著加速数据采集的方法。我们不是使用单个闪烁体来对放射性分子的衰变进行成像，而是将放射性标记的细胞夹在两个闪烁体之间。作为概念验证，我们对用[18F]FDG 标记的细胞进行了成像，[18F]FDG 是一种常用于肿瘤成像的放射性葡萄糖。结果表明，双闪烁体配置将显微镜的灵敏度提高了两倍，从而将图像采集时间缩短了一半，从而获得了与单闪烁体方法相同的结果。实验结果还与 Geant4 蒙特卡罗模拟进行了比较，以确认灵敏度提高了两倍，而空间分辨率仅略有下降。总的来说，这些发现表明，双闪烁体配置可用于进行时间敏感的研究，如细胞药代动力学或短寿命放射性示踪剂的细胞摄取。
