Dustin K. Ragan1, Stephen Yenzen Lai2,
James A. Bankson1
1Department of Imaging Physics, M. D.
Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, United States; 2Department of
Head and Neck Surgery, M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, United
States
Measurement
of pharmacokinetic parameters in small animal models of cancer is a
frequently-used tool in preclinical investigations of novel
interventions. One source of
uncertainty from these measurements arises from the challenges of quantifying
the concentration time course of a contrast agent in blood. We have proposed performing this
measurement in the heart, which allows reduced-artifact high temporal
resolution sampling. A pilot study was
performed in a thyroid tumor model comparing the inter-subject variation
produced by cardiac sampling with conventional sampling in a local blood
vessel, and found a large reduction in variation with the proposed approach.
Keywords