Interactive local super-resolution reconstruction of whole-body MRI mouse data: A pilot study with applications to bone and kidney metastases

In small animal imaging studies, when the locations of the micro-structures of interest are unknown a priori, there is a simultaneous need for full-body coverage and high resolution. In MRI, additional requirements to image contrast and acquisition time will often make it impossible to acquire such images directly. Recently, a resolution...

Brain maturation of the adolescent rat cortex and striatum: Changes in volume and myelination

Longitudinal studies on brain pathology and assessment of therapeutic strategies rely on a fully mature adult brain to exclude confounds of cerebral developmental changes. Thus, knowledge about onset of adulthood is indispensable for discrimination of developmental phase and adulthood. We have performed a high-resolution longitudinal MRI study...

Segmentation and visual analysis of whole-body mouse skeleton microSPECT

Whole-body SPECT small animal imaging is used to study cancer, and plays an important role in the development of new drugs. Comparing and exploring whole-body datasets can be a difficult and time-consuming task due to the inherent heterogeneity of the data (high volume/throughput, multi-modality, postural and positioning variability). The goal...

Articulated Whole-Body Atlases for Small Animal Image Analysis: Construction and Applications

Purpose Using three publicly available small-animal atlases (Sprague–Dawley rat, MOBY, and Digimouse), we built three articulated atlases and present several applications in the scope of molecular imaging. Procedures Major bones/bone groups were manually segmented for each atlas skeleton. Then, a kinematic model for each atlas was built: each...