The WSIC is currently equipped with two dedicated small animal PET/CT scanners, that allow in vivo investigations in the millimeter range and absolute quantification of the acquired data. Both PET systems use a CT to enable the acquisition of transmission data to correct the emission data for attenuation. In addition, the systems are equipped with dedicated animal beds which allow the monitoring of physiological parameters, such as heart and breathing rates, and maintain the animals’ body temperature at physiological levels. PET also play a siginficant role in receptor imaging and quantification as well as kinetic modelling of tracer uptake in various organs especially tumors, the heart or brain. The small patients will be scanned under deep anaesthesia either with isoflurane or any kind of injection anaesthetic to prevent stress for the animals and to avoid movement artifacts during the scan.
Non-invasive in vivo positron emission tomography (PET) is a powerful tool enabling the investigation of molecular, metabolic and functional parameters due to its high sensitivity and the variety of available specific radiopharmaceuticals. PET imaging is routinely employed in the clinics within different areas, e.g., for the diagnosis, staging and treatment response of tumor diseases in oncology, for diagnoses of neurodegenerative diseases such as dementia or Parkinson Disease and in cardiology to examine cardiac functionality or cardiovascular diseases. In regards to small animal imaging, PET is a powerful tool for basic research, facilitating the assessment of molecular and functional processes of diseases as well as potential therapies due to a multitude of obtainable animal models to study those diseases.
The combined PET/CT completely integrates the functional sensitivity of a microPET with the rich anatomical detail of diagnostic multi-slice CT.
One application of this highly advanced combined imaging modality is shown on the left. Recently, cell migration visualization has gained increasing interest with regard to cellular immunotherapy and stem cell transplantation. So, one of our protocols provides consequent advancements in the detection of small accumulations of these immune cells in single LNs and specific homing to the sites of inflammation by PET and an anatomical CT. A study published 2015 by our group member Dr. Grießinger in PNAS.
One of our devices was co-funded by the European Union as part of the ERDF program (ERDF 2021-2027 Baden-Württemberg) under project FEIH_2698539 and by the DFG (project no. 543350935). The other device was co-funded by the DFG (project no. 543351108).