Translational imaging - What, why and how?

Abstract

Through its varied instances, technologies and applications, biomedical imaging readily lends itself to translational approaches from in-vitro all the way to clinical. Whereas the disciplines, technologies, scales and scopes vary throughout the translational pipeline, they tend to coalesce when reaching the in-vivo context (e.g., through animal models), which ideally then leads to direct evaluation, validation and application in the human. This presentation will focus on demonstrating such a potential through a few in-vivo examples using imaging in a translational context, for providing and exploiting new biomarkers as well as to affect clinical workup, from diagnosis to therapy planning and follow-up. Suggested implementation strategy for suitably supporting such a multidisciplinary effort in the scope of cancer as an example will also be presented. The intent is not to wholly answer the questions in the title, but rather to open up the audience to what imaging - in a broad and modality-neutral sense - can not only bring to the fields of biomarkers and novel diagnostics, but also how it can help in bridging the usual gaps between fundamental research (e.g., biology, instrumentation, devices and in-vitro testing) and clinical applications.