Accelerated tumor cell repopulation during radiation therapy is one of the leading causes for low survival rates of head-and-neck cancer patients. The therapeutic effectiveness of radiotherapy could be improved by selectively targeting proliferating tumor subvolumes with higher doses of radiation. Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging with 3´-deoxy-3´-[18F]-fluorothymidine (FLT) has shown great potential as a non-invasive approach to characterizing the proliferation status of tumors. This thesis focuses on histopathological validation of FLT PET imaging specifically for image-guidance applications in biologically adaptive radiotherapy. The lack of experimental data supporting the use of FLT PET imaging for radiotherapy guidance is addressed by developing a novel methodology for histopathological validation of PET imaging. Using this new approach, the spatial concordance between the intratumoral pattern of FLT uptake and the spatial distribution of cell proliferation is demonstrated in animal tumors. First, a two-dimensional analysis is conducted comparing the microscopic FLT uptake as imaged with autoradiography and the distribution of active cell proliferation markers imaged with immunofluorescent microscopy. It was observed that when tumors present a pattern of cell proliferation that is highly dispersed throughout the tumor, even high-resolution imaging modalities such as autoradiography could not accurately determine the extent and spatial distribution of proliferative tumor subvolumes. While microscopic spatial coincidence between high FLT uptake regions and actively proliferative subvolumes was demonstrated in tumors with highly compartmentalized/aggregated features of cell proliferation, there were no conclusive results across the entire set of utilized tumor specimens. This emphasized the need for addressing the limited resolution of FLT PET when imaging microscopic patterns of cell proliferation. This issue was emphasized in the second part of the thesis where the spatial concordance between volumes segmented on FLT simulated FLT PET images and the three dimensional spatial distribution of cell proliferation markers was analyzed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:vcu.edu/oai:scholarscompass.vcu.edu:etd-3819 |
| Date | 18 May 2012 |
| Creators | Axente, Marian |
| Publisher | VCU Scholars Compass |
| Source Sets | Virginia Commonwealth University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | © The Author |
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