Fluorescence imaging to quantify the fluorescent microspheres in cardiac tissue

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Medical Imaging
• Cardiovascular Research

Background:

• Quantifying blood flow in cardiac tissue is crucial for diagnosing and treating cardiovascular diseases.
• Traditional methods for assessing blood flow, like digestion and extraction, are destructive and lack spatial resolution.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a non-destructive fluorescence imaging technique for quantifying fluorescent microsphere (FM) content in cardiac tissue.
• To establish a method for transforming fluorescence intensity into FM concentration for accurate blood flow assessment.

Main Methods:

• Utilized fluorescence imaging on both sides of pig heart slices to capture FM distribution.
• Developed a standard for converting fluorescence emission to FM concentration, accounting for light scattering and tissue contributions.
• Compared the novel method with traditional digestion and extraction techniques.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated that fluorescence intensity at any pixel is directly proportional to FM content, enabling accurate quantification.
• Showcased the transformation of fluorescence images into FM concentration maps.
• The proposed method offers non-destructiveness, high spatial resolution, high throughput, repeatability, and operational simplicity.

Conclusions:

• Fluorescence imaging provides a reliable and advantageous alternative for quantifying FM content in cardiac tissue.
• This technique offers significant improvements over conventional methods for blood flow assessment in cardiovascular research.