Multimodal Imaging in the Preclinical Research Space

Over my nearly 20 years working in the preclinical imaging industry, I have watched imaging modalities such as high frequency ultrasound go from only being used by early adopters in a handful of top research groups in North America, to it's almost ubiquitous placement in nearly every academic imaging core, and pharma/biotech company using preclinical animal models in their research and development teams.

Those first scientific conferences that I attended in 2006 had just a few posters displaying that now so prevalent M-Mode spectrum from the left ventricle to look at systolic function. Slowly ultrasound spread from not just cardiovascular imaging, but into cancer research, developmental biology, as well as general phenotyping, and model development.

This is just one example of the near exponential growth of preclinical imaging research being conducted over the past 20 years. Other modalities including bioluminescence/fluorescence, as well as MRI, CT, etc. have all shown similar, if not even greater, growth over the same time period.

It is now clear that preclinical imaging is almost expected, if you expect to have your research papers accepted into even some of the mediocre peer reviewed scientific journals. Further, the discussion of multimodal imaging has grown, and again the use of more than one imaging modality, and preferably modalities that examine a biological pathway or disease mechanism at a different scale (i.e. whole body, organ/tissue level, or microscopic) is expected to publish work in the top journals.

Multimodal imaging is not only important to increasing the impact of your publications, but more importantly it is crucial in helping scientists to fully elucidate and understand complex biological pathways and disease mechanisms. Additionally, imaging in general provides stronger data, as the same animal acts as it's own control throughout the course of the longitudinal study; imaging also helps to address the issues surrounding the 3 R's in small animal research - Replacement, Reduction, Refinement.

This is a publicly available recording of a webinar I gave back in 2023 where I reviewed many of the commonly employed imaging modalities, and further explored what multimodal imaging is, and the import role it plays the preclinical imaging space now, and the ever increasing role it will play in the future.