INFINITY
Non-invasive in vivo medical imaging of laboratory animals
INFINITY houses a wide range of state-of-the-art preclinical imaging devices, including ultrasound (US), computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), positron emission tomography (PET) and optical imaging.
Using these instruments, disease progression and treatment response
can be longitudinally monitored in laboratory animals. One of the major
strengths of INFINITY is that all these preclinical medical imaging
devices are available in adjacent rooms. Because in medical imaging
there is no Swiss-army-knife solution, this allows to easily combine and
correlate multiple medical imaging techniques (i.e., multimodal imaging)
to answer research questions related to preclinical medical imaging.
Multimodal image-guided radiotherapy
INFINITY houses a platform for laboratory animal radiation research, enabling researchers to plan high-precision multimodal image-guided radiotherapy on laboratory animals. Similar to human patients, animals can be followed up longitudinally using multimodal imaging to monitor disease progression and to evaluate different treatment strategies. In this way, we aim to search for the optimal treatment in patients.
MRI-CT guided radiotherapy workflow using a rat model for glioblastoma
About half of all cancer patients undergo radiotherapy at some stage of their care. For many decades, laboratory animal radiotherapy studies were performed using fairly crude experimental setups with large radiation fields that do not conform to only the tumour and therefore bear no resemblance to clinical radiotherapy. To improve the translation between laboratory animal research and human patients, we are mimicking the treatment of human glioblastoma using a rat model and multiple-beam high-precision radiotherapy. A MRI-CT guided radiotherapy planning workflow was developed, where MRI enables precise delineation of the target and CT is used for dose calculation.
Molecular-imaging based radiation treatment
In the last decade also molecular imaging techniques, such as PET, gained interest for radiation therapy treatment guidance. PET allows the visualisation of tumour heterogeneity of, for example, glucose consumption, amino acid transport or hypoxia. Targeting those highly proliferative or radio-resistant parts of the tumour with a higher dose could give a survival benefit. Using the laboratory animal radiation research platform present at INFINITY, the feasibility of PET-guided treatment strategies can be evaluated using in vivo and in silico study designs.
Our work
The experts
INFINITY is part of the Medical Image and Signal Processing (MEDISIP) research group within the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology of the
Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of Ghent University, As a result, INFINITY not only offers services for preclinical medical image acquisitions, but can also provide solutions for image reconstructions, advanced image processing and image analysis.
