Advanced Imaging Core

Project Summary/Abstract The Advanced Imaging Core provides to each of the projects of this Program Project Group the staffing, expertise, equipment, and interpretive skills needed to evaluate and test mechanisms of metastasis at the secondary site of the lung. The services provided are unique to this Core as they have been assembled from advances in microscopy and intravital imaging made by a number of independent laboratories within Einstein’s Gruss-Lipper Biophotonics center. As described in detail within the research strategy, these services consist of 1) A custom-built multi-laser multiphoton microscope; 2) Longitudinal intravital imaging at single cell resolution; 3) In vivo lung and other secondary site imaging; 4) In vivo cell fate mapping; 5) Large- Volume High-Resolution Intravital Imaging (LVHR-IVI); 6) A repository of biosensors for stemness, dormancy, invasiveness, and hypoxia; 7) Correlative microscopy combining intravital imaging with histopathology (IVITA); and 8) Quantitative digital pathology services for fixed tissue studies. In general, the use of advanced multiphoton microscopy; the preparation of animals for imaging including anesthesia and surgery; and the analysis and interpretation of the data collected require skill developed through practice. With dedicated expert staff members, Core A will centralize the equipment and knowledgebase needed to ensure prioritized access, and proper validated usage of all of the services, to the members of this Program Project Group in a way that ensures the rigor and reproducibility of all of the experiments. Investigators in the various Projects of this PPG will use Core A by first consulting with senior staff to define the goals for the experiments and prepare a protocol to achieve these goals. The staff of this core will then work with a representative from the project to execute the experiment, with the core staff supplying the hands-on skill during the demanding steps in animal surgery and handling, imaging and data collection to ensure uniformity of application of the method and the quality control needed to obtain and interpret the data. Without the services provided by Core A, our understanding of these processes would be derived from model systems and/or end-stage assays that only approximate the physiology of lung metastasis. In contrast, our approach is uniquely able to provide information about mechanism of in vivo behavior at the single cell level.