A goal of Alzheimer's researchers is to develop drugs that remove the amyloid beta plaques. However, researchers need a non-invasive, safe, and cost-effective method of tracking the plaques' number and size in order to develop drug therapy. The plaques are extremely small, and computed tomography does not perform well between the plaques and other soft tissue, the press release says.

The technique developed at Brookhaven is called diffraction-enhanced imaging (DEI), and might supply the extra imaging power necessary. DEI uses extremely bright beams of x-rays available at synchrotron sources including Brookhaven's National Synchrotron Light Source, and can visualize bone and soft tissue in a way that is not possible using standard x-rays. In contrast to conventional methods, synchrotron x-ray beams are thousands of times intensified and extremely concentrated into a narrow beam. This results in a lower x-ray dose with a higher image quality.


In the new study, researchers from Brookhaven and Stony Brook University used DEI in a high-resolution mode--micro-computed tomography-that visualized individual plaques in a mouse-brain model of Alzheimer's disease. This produced detailed images of the plaques, and demonstrated that DEI can be used on whole brains to visualize a wide range of anatomical structures without a contrast agent.

The images have the potential to exceed MRI pictures in resolution, Dean Connor, a former postdoctoral researcher at Brookhaven Lab now working for the University of North Carolina, said in the press release. "The contrast and resolution we achieved in comparison to other types of imaging really is amazing," he commented. "When DEI is used, everything just lights up."

The radiation dose used for this study is too high to safely image individual plaques in humans but could lead to development of an imaging modality that will work in humans, Connor said. "We've also now shown that we can see these plaques in a full brain, which means we can produce images from a live animal and learn how these plaques grow."

Adapted from press releases by Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Society for Nuclear Medicine.

Lynn Shapiro contributed to this report.

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