BERLIN (Dispatches)-Making tumor cells glow: medical physicists have developed a new method that can generate detailed three-dimensional images of the body's interior. This can be used to more closely investigate the development of cancer cells in the body.
"Our aim is to visualize cancer cells inside the living body to find out how they function, how they spread and how they react to new therapies," says medical physicist Professor Jan Laufer from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), Germany. He specializes in the field of photo acoustic imaging, a process that uses ultrasound waves generated by laser beams to produce high-resolution, three-dimensional images of the body's interior.
"The special feature of phytochrome proteins is that they alter their structure and thus also their absorption properties depending on the wavelength of the laser beam. These results in changes to the amplitude of the ultrasound waves that are generated in the tumor cells. None of the other tissue components, for example blood vessels, have this property -- their signal remains constant," Laufer says. By calculating the difference between the two images, a high-resolution, three-dimensional image of the tumor cells is created, which is free of the otherwise overwhelming background contrast.
The development of Halle's medical physicists can be applied to a wide range of applications in the preclinical research and the life sciences. In addition to cancer research, the method can be used to observe cellular and genetic processes in living organisms.