Hyperlipidemic mice as a model for a real‐time in vivo detection of atherosclerosis by gold nanorods‐based diffusion reflection technique

Abstract

Atherosclerosis (AS), the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in cardiovascular disease, needs an early detection for treatment and prevention of fatal events. Here, for the first time, we applied gold nanorods (GNRs)-assisted diffusion reflection (DR), a noninvasive technique for in vivo detection of AS in a high-fat-diet-induced c57bl mouse model, which resembles the manifestation of AS in humans. DR simply detects the change in light reflection profile of tissue due to the accumulation of GNRs in the AS plaques and enables clear detection of AS lesions in carotid and femoral arteries of these hyperlipidemic mice. After 24 hours post-GNRs injection, DR showed the highest efficiency of AS detection. Moreover, the sensitivity of the DR method is much higher than computed tomography (CT) and is comparable to ex vivo high-resolution CT. Our results strongly suggest that the DR method can detect early atherosclerotic lesions in a sensitive and specific manner.

The Scattering of Gold Nanorods Combined with Differential Uptake, Paving a New Detection Method for Macrophage Subtypes Using Flow Cytometery

“…The easily tunable versatile optical property, which comes with the advantage of biocompatibility, opens a wide range of biomedical applications for gold nanoparticles (GNPs) . By virtue of strong absorbance, GNPs have a promising future in biomedical diagnostics as a suitable contrast agent for cellular imaging, including two-photon photoluminescence microscopy, coherence tomography, photoacoustic tomography, and recently in diffusion reflection. − The high scattering potency of GNPs is utilized in optical imaging by dark field microscopy and confocal reflectance microscopy. , We chose gold nanorods (GNRs) for this study, as GNRs show an order of magnitude higher absorption and scattering coefficient relative to nanospheres of the same effective radius …”