Zootechnical Issues in Small Animal Imaging

This chapter is focused on animal handling during rodent imaging. Particularly in studies of peripheral organs, the nutritional status of an animal may affect the imaging results. Anesthetics can also have a strong impact on scan data, for example, in drug research or studies of the brain. Physiological parameters like body temperature, heart rate, ventilation frequency, and oxygenation of the blood should always be carefully monitored and be kept close to their normal values or be standardized as much as possible when data from different animals are compared. Most PET and SPECT studies have employed the intravenous route for tracer administration. Several other routes are possible although these are probably not as widely applicable. For many studies, the combination of functional (PET, SPECT, fMRI) and anatomic (CT, US, MRI) imaging offers significant advantages, particularly if functional and anatomic data can be acquired simultaneously