It is highly desirable to develop novel approaches to improve patient survival rate of pancreatic cancer through early detection. Here, we present such an approach based on photoacoustic and fluorescence molecular imaging of pancreatic tumor using a miniature multimodal endoscope in combination with targeted multifunctional iron oxide nanoparticles (IONPs). A novel fan-shaped scanning mechanism was developed to minimize the invasiveness for endoscopic imaging of pancreatic tumors. The results show that the enhancements in photoacoustic and fluorescence signals using amino-terminal fragment (ATF) targeted IONPs were ~four to six times higher compared to that using non-targeted IONPs. Our study indicates the potential of the combination of the multimodal photoacoustic-fluorescence endoscopy and targeted multifunctional nanoparticles as an efficient tool to provide improved specificity and sensitivity for pancreatic cancer detection.

We described a novel handheld device (termed FMTPen) for three-dimensional (3D) fluorescence molecular tomography (FMT). The FMTpen is characterized by its bendable structure and miniaturized size (10 mm in diameter) that can be potentially used as an intraoperative tool for the detection of tumor margins and for image-guided surgery. Several phantom experiments based on indocyanine green (ICG), an FDA approved near-infrared (NIR) fluorescent dye, were conducted to evaluate the imaging ability of this device. Two tumor-bearing mice were systematically injected with tumor-targeted NIR fluorescent probes (NIR-830-ATF68-IONP and NIR-830-ZHER2:343-IONP, respectively) and were then imaged to further demonstrate the ability of this FMT probe for imaging small animals.