Preclinical spectral computed tomography of gold nano-particles

Today's state-of the art clinical computed tomography (CT) scanners exclusively use energy-integrating, scintillation detector technology, despite the fact that a part of the information carried by the transmitted X-ray photons is lost during the detection process. Room-temperature semiconductors, like CdTe or CZT, operated in energy-sensitive photon-counting mode provide information about the energy of every single X-ray detection event. This capability allows novel, promising approaches to selectively image abnormal tissue types like cancerous tissue or atherosclerotic plaque with the CT modality. In this article we report on recent dual K-edge imaging results obtained in the domain of pre-clinical, energy-sensitive photon-counting CT. In this approach, the tuning of threshold levels in the detector electronics to the K-edge energy in the attenuation of contrast agents (CA) offers highly specific, quantitative imaging of the distribution of the CA on top of the conventional, morphological image information. The combination of the high specificity of the K-edge imaging technique together with the powerful tool of targeting specific diseases in the human body by dedicated contrast materials might enrich the CT modality with capabilities of functional imaging known from the nuclear medicine imaging modalities, e.g., positron-emission-tomography but with the additional advantage of high spatial and temporal resolution. We also discuss briefly the technological difficulties to be overcome when translating the technique to human CT imaging and present the results of simulations indicating the feasibility of the K-edge imaging of vulnerable plaque using targeted gold nano-particles as contrast materials. Our experiments in the pre-clinical domain show that dual-K edge imaging of iodine and gold-based CAs is feasible while our simulations for the imaging of gold CAs in the clinical case support the future possibility of translating the technique to human imaging. (c) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.