Molecular imaging
techniques are essential tools for better investigating
biological processes and detecting disease biomarkers with improvement
of both diagnosis and therapy monitoring. Often, a single imaging
technique is not sufficient to obtain comprehensive information at
different levels. Multimodal diagnostic probes are key tools to enable
imaging across multiple scales. The direct registration of
in vivo
imaging markers with
ex vivo
imaging
at the cellular level with a single probe is still challenging. Fluorinated
(
19
F) probes have been increasingly showing promising potentialities
for
in vivo
cell tracking by
19
F-MRI.
Here we present the unique features of a bioorthogonal
19
F-probe that enables direct signal correlation of MRI with Raman
imaging. In particular, we reveal the ability of PERFECTA, a superfluorinated
molecule, to exhibit a remarkable intense Raman signal distinct from
cell and tissue fingerprints. Therefore, PERFECTA combines in a single
molecule excellent characteristics for both macroscopic
in
vivo
19
F-MRI, across the whole body, and microscopic
imaging at tissue and cellular levels by Raman imaging.
SERS tags are a class of nanoparticles with great potential in advanced imaging experiments. The preparation of SERS tags however is complex, as they suffer from the high variability of the SERS signals observed even at the slightest sign of aggregation. Here, we developed a method for the preparation of SERS tags based on the use of gold nanostars conjugated with neutravidin. The SERS tags here obtained are extremely stable in all biological buffers commonly employed and can be prepared at a relatively large scale in very mild conditions. The obtained SERS tags have been used to monitor the expression of fibroblast activation protein alpha (FAP) on the membrane of primary fibroblasts obtained from patients affected by Crohn’s disease. The SERS tags allowed the unambiguous identification of FAP on the surface of cells thus suggesting the feasibility of semi-quantitative analysis of the target protein. Moreover, the use of the neutravidin–biotin system allows to apply the SERS tags for any other marker detection, for example, different cancer cell types, simply by changing the biotinylated antibody chosen in the analysis.
The global healthcare landscape is continuously changing throughout the world as technology advances, leading to a gradual change in lifestyle. Several diseases such as asthma and cardiovascular conditions are becoming more diffuse, due to a rise in pollution exposure and a more sedentary lifestyle. Healthcare providers deal with increasing new challenges, and thanks to fast-developing big data technologies, they can be faced with systems that provide direct support to citizens. In this context, within the EU-funded Participatory Urban Living for Sustainable Environments (PULSE) project, we are implementing a data analytic platform designed to provide public health decision makers with advanced approaches, to jointly analyze maps and geospatial information with healthcare and air pollution data. In this paper we describe a component of such platforms, which couples deep learning analysis of urban geospatial images with healthcare indexes collected by the 500 Cities project. By applying a pre-learned deep Neural Network architecture, satellite images of New York City are analyzed and latent feature variables are extracted. These features are used to derive clusters, which are correlated with healthcare indicators by means of a multivariate classification model. Thanks to this pipeline, it is possible to show that, in New York City, health care indexes are significantly correlated to the urban landscape. This pipeline can serve as a basis to ease urban planning, since the same interventions can be organized on similar areas, even if geographically distant.
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