David Blauvelt
Benjamin Vakoc Lab, Wellman Center for Photomedicine
Doppler Optical Frequency Domain Imaging

"This project focuses on studying tumor angiogenesis. We study the roles of different proangiogenic proteins in the development of abnormal tumor vasculature. Images like these help us quantify the size, shape, and number of vessels in a tumor and how these parameters change after various interventions. This image shows the vasculature of a developing glioblastoma, 8 days after it was implanted into the brain of a normal mouse.

Some of the larger goals of our research, aside from understanding the biology of tumor angiogenesis, include development of new techniques for imaging blood vessels. One new direction of the lab is to develop a way to image and quantify blood flow over an entire tumor volume. Our approach employs similar techniques to the ones used to generate this image, and thus, this snapshot is the groundwork for developing new technology in vascular imaging."