Skeletal imaging

Abstract

During the past two decades, the use and refinements of imaging modalities have markedly increased taking now a significant place in drug development. The practical use of preclinical imaging represents an important step in the refinement of animal studies allowing longitudinal assessments with powerful, noninvasive, and clinically translatable tools to monitor drug effects. This chapter reviews the different imaging modalities used in the preclinical studies to evaluate the skeleton and bone tissue: X-rays, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), peripheral quantitative computed tomography (pQCT), micro-CT, high-resolution pQCT (HR-pQCT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), to understand the technologies, their applications and limitations, and important considerations for including these different imaging technologies in toxicology rodent and non-rodent studies, good laboratory practice (GLP) validation, to actually integrate imaging approaches into safety assessment in drug development. Ongoing research and development focusing on integrating different imaging modalities and increasing resolution will certainly facilitate the translational applications from anatomical to molecular and functional evaluations to improve the efficacy in toxicology preclinical studies and accelerate drug development.