Preclinical Optical Molecular Imaging

Molecular imaging, especially small-animal preclinical molecular imaging, is a rapidly developing area in the biomedical imaging field [1–3]. Given tremendous needs in biological research and drug development, it becomes imperative to have in vivo imaging strategies for gene expression, protein interactions, and cell behaviours [4]. Molecular imaging has been demonstrated to be instrumental or promising in observing all these biological processes at the cellular and molecular levels. Since optical labelling methods with probes based on fluorescence and bioluminescence have been extensively applied in vitro, it was natural to transfer corresponding strategies to in vivo settings, and there have been successful over the past several years [1, 5].