Cancer cells require access to blood vessels for oxygen and nutrients to enable growth and metastasis, making the tumour vasculature an attractive potential target for cancer therapies. Recent evidence suggests that the tumour vasculature plays a significant role in tumour response to high dose radiation therapy; however this effect is not well characterized due to limitations in quantitative imaging of the microvasculature.
Speckle variance optical coherence tomography is an emerging imaging modality capable of 3D, non-invasive imaging of in vivo microvasculature. This thesis outlines the work done to test the hypothesis that svOCT imaging can be used to quantitatively monitor the vascular effects of high dose radiotherapy in a preclinical model. This was achieved through the development of a quantification pipeline for longitudinal 3-D svOCT images of microvascular radioresponse.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/33388 |
| Date | 21 November 2012 |
| Creators | Conroy, Leigh |
| Contributors | Vitkin, Alex |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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