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Molecular medicine is focusing its attention on developing immunotherapeutic strategies that engage the immune system to combat a number of human diseases, including cancer. As a result, great emphasis has been placed on enhancing existing imaging modalities and developing new imaging techniques in order to assess the in vivo consequences of a given immunotherapy. Recently, improvements in the resolution and sensitivity of existing in vivo imaging modalities, including computed tomography (CT), ultrasound (US), positron emission tomography (PET), single positron emission tomography (SPECT), optical imaging (OI), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), have evolved enormously. In this chapter, each modality, used either individually or together as multi-modal hybrid imaging techniques, will be evaluated in the context of how they contribute to assessing immunotherapies in vivo in preclinical and clinical settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biomedical imaging has been changing the way medicine is practiced ever since. Imaging techniques used in clinical pharmacology can be categorized as either functional or anatomical modalities. Functional modalities are capable of visualizing biological processes within organs or tissues at a molecular level. Positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) are well established tools, whereas optical imaging (fluorescence) is a novel and promising one. Structural morphology of organs or tissues can be investigated with anatomical techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), X-ray computed tomography (CT) or ultrasound imaging. Furthermore there is the up-and-coming possibility to combine different imaging modalities such as PET/CT, SPECT/CT, and MRI/PET in order to match functional to anatomical information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computational imaging of personalized cardiac electrophysiology has attracted increasing research interest because of its clinical relevance in aiding in the diagnosis and prediction of cardiac electrical malfunctions of individual subjects. We have developed a statistical physiological-model-constrained framework that, rather than delivering a personalized cardiac electrophysiological model with customized parameters, uses simple standard electrophysiological models as constraints and produces maximum a posteriori estimation of three-dimensionally distributed transmembrane potential (TMP) dynamics inside the ventricular myocardium of individual subjects [1]. Taking part in 2010 Cardiac Electrophysiological Simulation Challenge (CESC΄10), we modify this framework to use epicardial optical mapping data to estimate subject-specific TMP dynamics inside the 3D myocardium. Results of estimated dynamics are compared to the simulations by the same electrophysiological model with standard or adjusted parameters. As shown, while it is rather challenging to personalize the parameters of a cardiac electrophysiological model for the entire 3D myocardium, because of the drastically simplified model structure and limited subject΄s data, the presented approach of TMP estimation is able to computationally reproduce subject-specific electrical functions inside the 3D myocardium with simple standard model as constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the plastic change in the auditory cortex induced by fear conditioning with pairing of sound (Conditioned Stimulus, CS) and electric foot-shock (Unconditioned Stimulus, US) was investigated by using of an optical recording. To investigate the effect of associated learning, optical signals in the auditory cortex to CS (12 kHz pure tone) and non-CS (8 kHz and 16 kHz pure tone) were recorded before and after the conditioning. As a result, the response area only to CS increased after the conditioning. On the other hand, to investigate whether auditory information could be retrieved by electric foot-shock after associated learning or not, auditory response to foot-shock alone was also investigated. As a result, the optical response in the auditory cortex to electric foot-shock alone could not be observed before the conditioning but clearly appeared after the conditioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]