The secret soul of things

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Maternal fluoxetine exposure alters cortical hemodynamic and calcium response of offspring to somatosensory stimuli

Epidemiological studies have found an increased incidence of neurodevelopmental disorders in populations prenatally exposed to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Optical imaging provides a minimally invasive way to determine if perinatal SSRI exposure has long-term effects on cortical function. Herein we probed the functional neuroimaging effects of perinatal SSRI exposure in a fluoxetine (FLX)-exposed mouse model. While resting-state homotopic contralateral functional connectivity was unperturbed, the evoked cortical response to forepaw stimulation was altered in FLX mice. The stimulated cortex showed decreased activity for FLX versus controls, by both hemodynamic responses [oxyhemoglobin (Hb

Banking of human tissue for biomonitoring and exposure assessment: utility for environmental epidemiology and surveillance.

Human tissue banking could provide a tool to address a number of public health concerns. We can potentially use it to monitor trends in human exposures, serve as an early warning system for new environmental exposures, assess low-level exposures around hazardous waste and other point sources of pollutants, evaluate the effectiveness of regulatory programs, and study etiologies of diseases (e.g., childhood cancer and birth defects) that are likely to be related to the environment. This article discusses opportunities to establish human tissue banks in connection with pre-existing public health surveillance programs for cancer and adverse reproductive outcomes. This is a cost-effective way to conduct surveillance and enhances the ability to carry out epidemiologic studies. The article also discusses ethical issues that are particularly important for public health practice. One is the issue of risk communication and the need to explain risks in a way that provides people with the information they need to determine appropriate action on the individual and community levels. Second is the issue of environmental justice. We recommend early involvement of communities that are likely to be involved in tissue-banking projects and full explanation of individual and group social risks from their participation

Quantitative high-resolution photoacoustic spectroscopy by combining photoacoustic imaging with diffuse optical tomography

The specificity of both molecular and functional photoacoustic (PA) images depends on the accuracy of the photoacoustic absorption spectroscopy. Because the PA signal is a product of both the optical absorption coefficient and the local light fluence, quantitative PA measurements of absorption require an accurate estimate of the optical fluence. Lightmodeling aided by diffuse optical tomography (DOT) methods can be used to provide the required fluence map and to reduce errors in traditional PA spectroscopic analysis. As a proof-ofconcept, we designed a phantom to demonstrate artifacts commonly found in photoacoustic tomography (PAT) and how fluence-related artifacts in PAT images can lead to misrepresentations of tissue properties. Specifically, we show that without accounting for fluence-related inhomogeneities in our phantom, errors in estimates of the absorption coefficient from a PAT image were as much as 33%. To correct for this problem, DOT was used to reconstruct spatial distributions of the absorption coefficients of the phantom, and along with the surface fluence distribution from the PAT system, we calculated the fluence everywhere in the phantom. This fluence map was used to correct PAT images of the phantom, reducing the error in the estimated absorption coefficient from the PAT image to less than 5%. Thus, we demonstrate experimentally that combining DOT with PAT can significantly reduce fluence-related errors in PAT images, as well as produce quantitatively accurate, highresolution images of the optical absorption coefficient