Tumor treatment is an important factor affecting the five-year survival rate of patients. At present, the main method of tumor treatment is still surgical resection. Accurate and effective tumor resection is the key to improve the five-year survival rate of patients.
The new optical molecular imaging technology provides a new method and new idea for image-guided surgery. The Nobel Prize winner Roger Yonchien Tsien and other scholars have carried out a lot of research, trying to "light up" the tumor with fluorescence imaging method in vivo, solve the problem of tumor identification, and have opened up the application of optical molecular imaging technology in the field of surgical navigation. Meanwhile, scientists have been exploring how to use fluorescence imaging technology to solve clinical problems. However, they have been facing lots of challenges.
Through in-depth interdisciplinary exploration in medical engineering, the Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging, the Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging, Chinese Academy of Sciences has successfully developed a new type of near-infrared-II (NIR-II) fluorescence imaging system and surgical navigation technology, and further used the fluorescent probe indocyanine green (ICG) to carry out the application of the technology in the imaging of human liver cancer, and solved the clinical transformation. It is found that this technique can find small lesions and metastases of liver cancer which are difficult to be found by other imaging modalities during operation. Thus, it can significantly improve the accuracy of surgical resection.
Relevant work has been published in the authoritative journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. The Editor in Chief of Nature Biomedical Engineering and professors of Harvard Medical School referred to the work as 'the first in human'. After ten years of fundamental research of NIR-II imaging technology, it has been successfully used in clinical practice for the first time in the world. Its wide applications in medicine will ultimately benefiting patients.
The first author of this paper is Prof. Hu Zhenhua, and the corresponding author is Prof. Tian Jie. The research was supported by NSFC, the National Key Research and Development Program of China, Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Full Text：
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-019-0494-0
Read More:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-020-0544-7
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-020-0536-7
Contact:
ZHANG Xiaohan, PIO, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Email: xiaohan.zhang@ia.ac.cn