Abstract

Measurement and quantification of rare circulating cell populations is extremely important in many areas of pre-clinical biomedical research, for example, in detection of circulating tumor cells. This need has driven the development of “in vivo flow cytometry” (IVFC) technologies, wherein specific circulating cell populations are detected using fluorescence microscopy, two-photon microsocopy, photo-acoustic or photo-thermal methods. However, most existing methods rely on interrogation of very small blood vessels which in practice inherently limits detection sensitivity to about 1e4 cells per mL. This is inadequate for specific applications where very rare circulating cells populations (<1e4 mL^-1) are of interest, such as minimal residual disease or stem cell therapeutics.

© 2013 Optical Society of America