IMAGE-GUIDED SURGERY · Preclinical Protocols For Image-Guided Surgery

This project aims to build upon current developments in molecular imaging by developing a camera system and a tumour margin marker to be used in a first-in-human-trail. Molecular in vivo imaging is a fertile area which harbours a mix of expertise, state-of-art equipment and many different disciplines and inter-sector work environments. It is hoped that in the future it will be implemented as the fourth clinical modality in conjunction with the three already established clinical imaging techniques of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), x-ray computed tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET). The proposed project seeks to demonstrate that ZW800-1 (a novel zwitterionic Near Infra-Red Fluorescence (NIRF) dye), when conjugated onto a cRGD peptide, can be used to identify a minimum tumour margin distance during intra-operative image-guided surgery. These will be optimized to be used with clinical hand-held camera systems ArtemisTM, mini-FLARETM and MSOTTM . The overall aim is to aid the surgeon to visibly demarcate tumour from healthy tissue so that a complete image-guided surgical solution to cancer can be of benefit to patients and the healthcare system.