Identification of Intravasation Sites Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging

摘要

Metastasis is the major cause of death of breast cancer patients. An important step in metastasis is the intravasation of tumor cells, and we hypothesize that leakage of serum components from blood vessels can stimulate intravasation and metastasis. Alternatively, we have also found that macrophages in the tumor can enhance metastasis. Thus assays that would evaluate blood vessel leakiness and macrophage density over the entire tumor could improve our ability to identify metastatic tumors. Magnetic resonance imaging is well established as a method for evaluating blood vessel properties in patients, and probes have also been developed to identify macrophages (due to their high phagocytic ability). We proposed to study several mouse models of metastatic breast cancer in order to identify MRI imaging methods that might be useful for identifying metastatic tumors.