Abstract

In vivo imaging of treatment responses at the molecular level could have a significant impact on the speed of drug discovery and ultimately lead to personalized medicine. Strong interest has been shown in developing quantitative fluorescence-based technologies with good molecular specificity and sensitivity for noninvasive 3D imaging through tissues and whole animals. We show herein that tumor response to chemotherapy can be accurately resolved by fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT) with a phosphatidylserine-sensing fluorescent probe based on modified annexins. We observed at least a 10-fold increase of fluorochrome concentration in cyclophosphamide-sensitive tumors and a 7-fold increase of resistant tumors compared with control studies. FMT is an optical imaging technique developed to overcome limitations of commonly used planar illumination methods and demonstrates higher quantification accuracy validated by histology. It is further shown that a 3-fold variation in background absorption heterogeneity may yield 100% errors in planar imaging but only 20% error in FMT, thus confirming tomographic imaging as a preferred tool for quantitative investigations of fluorescent probes in tissues. Tomographic approaches are found essential for small-animal optical imaging and are potentially well suited for clinical drug development and monitoring.