Introduction to Preclinical Imaging

The Lab organizes and conducts Introductory Preclinical Imaging Courses and Workshops for Small Animal Imaging. These courses are recommended before the students start their respective imaging projects in our lab. Besides these introductory courses, UBC ACS offers six different lab rodent courses which are mandatory for any student handling animals in the lab.

The topics covered include:

  • Animal Protocols and Monitoring Sheets in the lab
  • Animal handling
  • Imaging Modalities and Comparison
  • Basics of PET and SPECT
  • Preclinical Imaging Projects in the lab
  • Image analysis

Imaging Data Analysis Workshop

In this workshop, the principles to visualize and analyze images are explained and demonstrated. The objective of this course is to give the students the necessary expertise to evaluate, select and use existing programs and equipment for image visualization and analysis.

Smaller guided exercises will help the student to have a hands-on experience with some of the concepts presented during the teaching classes. As part of a larger assignment the students will experiment with a complete data set for analysis to solve a more complex image analysis task.

Educational Objectives

  • Importance of phantoms in Nuclear Medicine
  • Analysis of resolution, uniformity and contrast phantoms
  • To gain experience with data visualization (2D and 3D), prepare movies and quality images for papers/presentations
  • To understand the in vivo biodistribution of a radiotracer using the resultant time activity curves (TACs)