A group of researchers at Umeå University in Sweden have made it easier to study the insulin-producing cells in diabetes among other uses diabetes, with their new imaging method, which has been presented by in the form of a video in the biomedical video journal, The Journal of Visualized Experiments.
According to the team from the Umeå Center for Molecular Medicine (UCMM), led by Professor Ulf Ahlgren, they have developed technology for biomedical imaging with optical projection tomography (OPT). In the beginning, they could only apply the method to relatively small preparations, but since 2008 the team of researchers have managed to study whole organs from adult mice, including the pancreas, the organ responsible for the wellbeing risk of diabetes.
The scientists have explained that they have further developed OPT technology by going from ordinary visible light to the near-infrared spectrum. This near-infrared light can penetrate your tissue more easily, due to its longer wavelengths, which is why researchers can study larger samples than previously possible. This is important for your wellness because rat pancreases can now be studied, and these are the most similar laboratory animals to humans, so further discoveries in the field of diabetes can now be made.
The team can also study more and different cell types in one organ preparation, because the technology gives them access to a broader range of the light spectrum. In their articles, the scientists claim that they may one day be able to simultaneously track your insulin-producing islets of Langerhans as well as your autoimmune infiltrating cells and the distribution of blood vessels in a model system for type 1 diabetes.
At the moment, only indirect methods exist to study diabetes, and so huge resources are being committed worldwide to the development of non-invasive imaging methods. Yet the results from newer methods are hard to contrast with agents that specifically bind to the insulin producing cells of the pancreas to allow imaging. This technology development may now change all of that, as it plays an important part in enabling this contrast evaluation, as well as being able to calibrate the non-invasive read out.
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