Optical Molecular Imaging Approaches in Colorectal Cancer

Abstract

Major clinical applications for molecular imaging are improvement of disease detection through increased image contrast between normal and diseased tissue, in situ characterization of lesions for improved patient stratification, and generation of an early measurement of the likelihood of successful response to specific therapies. Imaging concentrations of biological targets such as cell surface receptors, proteins in the extracellular matrix, levels of metabolites and their utilization rates, and levels of specific cell types in lesions can help achieve the broad clinical goals of detection, characterization, and therapy response assessment sooner and more accurately than we can currently achieve with standard-of-care imaging techniques that rely largely on anatomic appearance for such evaluation.