Tumor diagnosis is expected to be done by "taking pictures"

Professor Zhang Fan's team in the Department of Chemistry of Fudan University has made important progress in the field of near-infrared fluorescence life living imaging after many years of research. Their research suggests that tumor diseases will hopefully be diagnosed with non-invasing near-infrared fluorescence life imaging technology, eliminating the need for surgical skep. The paper was published recently in Nature Nanotechnology.
fluorescence is a common luminescence phenomenon in nature, fluorescent probe medium has long been used to image biological tissue, but in the past, researchers focused on visible light areas and near-infrared first window fluorescence imaging, as if at night with a camera to take pictures, not only difficult to capture distant objects, the noise in the imaging will be particularly clear. Later, scientists found that in the second window area of near-infrared, light penetrates the skin, fat and other biological tissue "loss rate" is very small, can better achieve deep tissue imaging of organisms. However, further research has found that the imaging technology in the actual live multi-imaging applications are often less than satisfactory.
after hard work, Zhang Fan's team proposed "multi-imaging based on the time dimension", that is, the use of fluorescent emission in the second window area of the near-infrared rare earth nano probe fluorescence life signal to achieve multiple imaging of living organisms. When the fluorescent probe is stimulated by a near-infrared laser, the probe absorbs energy from the base state to the excitation state, and when the excitation light is removed, the probe fluorescence intensity decreases to the maximum fluorescence intensity at excitation (1/e hour) the time required is fluorescence life.
, the team found that fluorescence life was relatively stable and did not change as a result of changes in the depth of biological tissue. Based on this quantitative fluorescence life, Zhang Fan's team selected rare earth nanoparticles with lower toxicity and greater carrying bleaching capability for experiments. After a long period of research and precise regulation, the new imaging technology was successfully applied to the accurate diagnosis of breast cancer tumors, and the satisfactory results were obtained, and then quantitative testing of multiple tumor markers was carried out, and the results showed that the results obtained by the traditional detection techniques of clinical medicine were highly consistent.
"Time Dimension Multi-Imaging" replaces the original biopsy surgery in the form of "photographing", which not only directly avoids the risk of tumor cell metastasis, but also reduces the risk of human error that traditional methods may cause in tissue slicing, processing and scoring, and is expected to become a new noninvascopic tumor diagnosis method.
Zhang Fan said the research is still in the laboratory stage and needs to be further advanced to clinical trials. (Health News)