Nanodiamond molecular imaging with enhanced contrast and expanded field of view.
Nanodiamond imaging is a new molecular imaging modality that takes advantage of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in nanodiamonds to image a distribution of nanodiamonds with high sensitivity and high spatial resolution. Since nanodiamonds are nontoxic and are easily conjugated to biomolecules, nanodiamond imaging can potentially elicit physiological information from within a living organism. The position of the nanodiamonds is measured using optically detected electron spin resonance of the NVs. In a previous paper, we described a proof-of-principle nanodiamond imaging system with the ability to image in two dimensions over a 1×1  cm field of view and demonstrated imaging within scattering tissue. Here, we describe a second-generation nanodiamond imaging system with a field of view of 30×200  mm, and with three-dimensional imaging potential. The new system has a comparable spatial resolution of 1.2 mm FWHM and a sensitivity (in terms of the concentration of carbon atoms in a  mm3  voxel) of 1.6  mM mm3 Hz-1/2, a 3-dB improvement relative to the old system. We show that imaging at 2.872 GHz versus imaging at 2.869 GHz offers a 1.73× improvement in sensitivity with only a 20% decrease in resolution and motivate this by describing the observed lineshape starting from the NV spin Hamiltonian.
University of California, Berkeley, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, 205 Cory Hall, Berkeley, California 94720-1770, USA. hegyi@eecs.berkeley.edu
Alex
A
Hegyi
Eli
E
Yablonovitch
D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D009682:Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy; D008872:Microwaves; D057054:Molecular Imaging / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*; D058612:Nanodiamonds / Q000737:chemistry*; D009584:Nitrogen / Q000737:chemistry; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D059629:Signal-To-Noise Ratio; D013050:Spectrometry, Fluorescence
D058612:Nanodiamonds; D009584:Nitrogen