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In vivo quantification of mouse autoimmune arthritis by PET/CT
Smriti Kundu-Raychaudhuri1,2, Anupam Mitra2,3, Ananya Datta-Mitra1,2
1Division of Rheumatology, Allergy and Clinical Immunology, School of Medicine, University of California Davis, Davis, California, USA.
Aim:
To quantify the progression and severity of mouse collagen-induced arthritis (CIA) using an in vivo imaging tool, (18) F-fluorodeoxyglucose ((18) F-FDG) PET/CT and validate it against gold standard 'histopathological' evaluation.
Method:
The PET radiotracer (18) F-FDG, a marker for glucose metabolism, was injected in mice at different stages of CIA and the radiotracer distribution was imaged using a PET scanner. A sequential CT scan provided correlated anatomy. Radiotracer concentration was derived from PET/CT images for individual limb joints and on a per-limb basis at different stages of the disease. The imaging outcomes were subjected to correlation analysis with concurrently measured clinical and histological score.
Results:
Clinical and histological score, and hence disease severity, showed a strong linear correlation (r(2) = 0.71, P = 0.001 and r(2) = 0.87, P < 0.001, respectively) with radiotracer concentration measured from PET/CT during the progression of CIA.
Conclusions:
The strong positive correlation of the (18) F-FDG PET/CT findings with the histopathological evaluation at different stages of the disease suggest the potential of this imaging tool for the non-invasive assessment of progression and severity in mouse autoimmune arthritis. Thus, in preclinical studies, (18) F-FDG PET/CT can be considered as a non-invasive tool to develop novel therapies of inflammatory arthritis.
