Fluorine microimaging and quantification using nuclear reaction analysis: A tool for validating tissue distribution of positron emission tomography tracers

摘要

An application of ion beam microprobe analysis has been developed for the quantitative imaging of fluorine compounds in biological samples on a micrometer scale. The difficulty of imaging fluorine at trace level concentration in biological tissues has been addressed by using a combination of nuclear reaction analysis and proton resonant backscattering spectrometry. With this method, the limit of detection of fluorine in thin biological samples can be as low as 3 μg/g. Quantitative imaging of fluorodeoxyglucose distribution, the most widely used tracer for detection of solid tumors by positron emission tomography, is shown as an example of this application.