Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can serve as a very sensitive technique for detecting small tumors in the body, but it is not as good at identifying the edges of a tumor.
Photoacoustic imaging tomography (PAT) is not as sensitive as MRI, but it excels at pinpointing the location of subsurface tissue structures, presumably including the edges of tumors. To take advantage of the best of both of these imaging techniques, a team of investigators led by Fanqing Frank Chen, Ph.D., University of California, San Francisco, has developed a "nanowonton" of cobalt and gold to create an imaging contrast agent for use with both MRI and PAT.
Reporting its work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, this team describes how it created the imaging agent by first preparing cobalt nanoparticles and then coating them with a uniform layer of gold. Cobalt nanoparticles are highly effective as MRI contrast enhancing agents, but by themselves, they are not suitable for use in humans. The gold layer not only makes the nanoparticles biocompatible but also adds PAT contrast enhancement as a particle characteristic. The investigators designed the gold coating to have a shape and thickness that maximizes the PAT response to a 700-nm imaging laser.