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Team marks success in cell imaging of liver

Cell imaging of the liver may go beyond still pictures and evolve into real-time videos in the future, providing doctors continuous and dependable information on the inner workings of their patients and possibly directions on how to cure them, the National Science Council (NSC) said yesterday.

The technology is called in vivo multiphoton microscopy and has achieved laboratory success. A team of National Taiwan University medical and physics researchers installed a titanium intravital hepatic (liver) imaging chamber on the belly of a rat and was able to video monitor metabolic activities of its liver.

The team's work was published in the Journal of Biomedical Optics last in February last year.

"Multiphoton microscopy is a relatively new nonlinear optical technique developed in the early 19 90s and allows for effective label-free imaging of many tissue types," said Wesley Chen (陳維良), a physicist on the team.

live action

"The technology is exciting as before we could only infer what happened inside the liver based on images taken at different times, but now we can see it in action," said Lee Hsuan-shu (李宣書), the team's contributing medical researcher.

The window-like device sheds light on liver function mechanisms, pathology and molecular biology, Lee said.

For example, the team has seen liver damage caused by Panadol overdose and has documented through bile duct ligation that bile duct congestion could cause jaundice.

"When the duct is congested, we can see that bile elimination is blocked; the juices then flow into the blood, and the reddish bilirubin and yellowish biliflavin show through the skin," Lee said.

Current imaging techniques, such as ultrasound, CT scans and magnetic resonance imaging, only provide macro images, Lee said, adding that although intravital videomicroscopy could provide images at a more microscopic level, it could not zoom in on a single cell.

"When observing at the cell level, resolution is often more important than magnification," Chen said.

less invasive

In addition to offering clearer images, the technology utilizes photons with long wavelengths and is therefore less invasive and more in-depth, Chen said.

"Compared to a single photon microscopy, which excites fluorophores with one single short-wavelength photon, multiphoton microscopy excite fluorophores with the energy of two long wavelength photons that arrive simultaneously," Chen said.

Asked when the technique could begin clinical trial, Lee said that installing a "window" in a person's abdomen might not get the greenlight from the hospital's ethics committee.

However, the "technology is promising and could be adapted in endoscopes to provide valuable information on patient diagnosis and treatment," Lee said.
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