spontaneous luminescence background in living nunu mice自发荧光背景生活努努老鼠.pdf

Advances in Molecular Imaging , 2012, 2, 5-11 /10.4236/ami.2012.22002 Published Online April 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ami) Spontaneous Luminescence Background in Living Nu/Nu Mice 1* 2 1 1 Federico Boschi , Antonello E Spinelli , Laura Calderan , Andrea Sbarbati 1Department of Neurological, Neuropsychological, Morphological and Motor Sciences, Section of Anatomy and Histology, University of Verona, Verona, Italy 2Medical Physics Department, S. Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milan, Italy Email: federico.boschi@univr.it Received March 6, 2012; revised March 20, 2012; accepted April 9, 2012 ABSTRACT Spontaneous light emission from living animals can overcome the investigated light signals in small animal lumines- cence imaging. Despite autofluorescence emission is well studied the spontaneous luminescence background is less known and its importance is growing due to the new born imaging techniques like Cerenkov Luminescence Imaging and Radionuclide Luminescence Imaging in which faint sources are often involved. In order to investigate the sponta- neous emission we studied the background luminescence in vivo from health Nu/Nu mice in optical imaging acquisi- tions and we related it with the optical properties of the diet of the animals. In particular luminescence images of mice feed with normal diet used in animal facilities were acquired using a commercial optical imager. The intensity and the spectral features of the luminescence emission from the animal surface after sunshine exposition and after normal light- ing laboratory