ABSTRACT
Yijen Lin Wu, Qing Ye, Haosen Zhang, T. Kevin Hitchens, and Chien Ho
In¨ammation plays crucial roles in a wide spectrum of disorders. In addition, cell-based immunotherapy has become more important in treating cancer and other diseases. Noninvasive longitudinal tracking of immune cells in vivo allows monitoring progression of a pathological condition, assessing therapeutic effectiveness, as well as serving as a surrogate determinant for clinical strategies. The scope of this chapter is to summarize our recent progress in noninvasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of immune cells, using solid organ transplantation in rodents as a model system for imaging the immune response. The current gold standard for accessing allograft rejection after organ transplantation, biopsy, is not only invasive but also prone to sampling errors. Monitoring immune cell accumulation in the rejecting organs with MRI provides a noninvasive alternative to biopsy. In this chapter, we concentrate on our recent studies using renal and cardiac transplantation models to illustrate the unique bene‹ts of cellular MRI.
