A Comparison of Imaging Techniques to Monitor Tumor Growth and Cancer Progression in Living Animals

Table 1

The process of analyzing tumor burden in whole mice.

	FDG-PET	T2W-MRI	BLI	FLI
Operating costs	Around five US dollars per time point per animal for all techniques
Equipment costs	~600,000 US dollars	1 to 2 million US dollars	<500,000 US dollars	<500,000 US dollars
Mouse preparation	Anesthesia, tracer injection, incubation time and positioning	Anesthesia, set up of monitoring, prescan for positioning	Anesthesia, substrate injection, incubation time, shaving (optional), and positioning	Anesthesia, shaving and positioning
Mouse preparation time	1 h 30 min	30 min	20 min	5 min
Scanning time	15 min/3D scan	30 min/2D multislice scan/area; (2 areas scanned per mouse)	1 s–2 min/picture; 1 to 10 pictures/scan	1 s–30 s/picture 1 to 10 pictures/scan
Data analysis	Requires expertise	Requires expertise	Straightforward	Straightforward
Data analysis time	1 h	1 h 30 min	20 min	20 min
Total time 1 animal	3 h	3 h	1 h	30 min
Total time 10 animals	13 h	30 h	2 h	1 h