Services:

• MicroPET small animal studies, including tail vein injection in mice, anesthesia (both injectable and inhalation), cardiac puncture for blood sampling, animal monitoring and PET imaging, calibration and data reconstruction
• Data archiving and image display (web-based access)
• Optical charge-coupled device (CCD) imaging
• Digital whole-body autoradiography (DWBA)
• MicroCAT (CT imaging for rat heads and whole-body mouse imaging)

Costs:

Operating Policies:
The facility is located in the Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging and is easily accessible to UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center (JCCC) members. Faculty investigators, research fellows or others who plan to conduct experiments in the resource should contact the Co-Director, Dr. David Stout, or the Director, Dr. Harvey Herschman, to discuss their experiments. Generally, Stout will assist them with study design, procedures, data analysis and training for interpretation of results. Pilot studies will be performed, if necessary, and the study design perfected. At this point, the project is generally performed by members of the investigator’s lab, with advice and assistance from the shared resource staff. While Stout and Herschman remain actively involved in the more complex projects, Stout oversees the technical quality of all work produced by Small Animal Imaging.

The CCD imaging system is available on a first-come, first-served basis through an online scheduling website. The system requires no supervision once a user is trained; therefore, it can be used at almost any hour of the day. MicroCT and MicroPET analyses are scheduled by committee, on a weekly basis. If scheduling conflicts arise, the committee will resolve them.