Small Animal Imaging

Small Animal Imaging has become an indispensable tool to assess the activity and effects of promising compounds in situ during all stages of drug development. Since these studies are non-invasive – an organism can be monitored in vivo over time – they allow insights which cannot be gained with any other method. The most crucial stage in the analysis of biological questions, which are approached using this technique, is the fast and accurate extraction of quantitative anatomical and functional information from 3D and 4D data sets.

Definiens Software Solutions for Small Animal Imaging

Definiens offers all the necessary functions for analyzing data from small animal imaging modalities, including anatomical-morphological imaging techniques such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Data can similarly be analyzed from molecular imaging techniques measuring the uptake of tracer substances, such as positron emission tomography (PET), single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), and fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT).

Definiens supports the sequential analysis of scan series over time, for example, to quantify the kinetics of tumor growth, measure tracer diffusion, or perform perfusion analyses as cardiac MRIs.

In the analysis of co-registered CT, SPECT or PET scans, the initial analysis of body- and skeleton-based data provides an anatomical context. Autoadaptive strategies make it easy to identify reliable thresholds. This facilitates the subsequent extraction of all relevant body structures, based on CT information or tracer signals derived from knowledge-based, context-driven classification and segmentation cycles that are gradually refined as the analysis proceeds. For identifying structures and organs on any scale, sophisticated anatomical models can be applied using detailed class descriptions. These can include fuzzy membership functions for robustness of analysis within single or multiple animals.

Deploying Definiens as a digital observer speeds up the batch analysis of large cohorts of animals, eliminates inter- and intra-observer variability, enables highly accurate measurements, increases the dimensionality of the final data set and provides unprecedented flexibility in the definition of endpoints to be read out.