REU Student: Rob Saunders, Mentor: Bob Welsh

One of the current problems facing biology is the lack of real time imaging of biological processes in animals. One current practice is to inject the animal with a radioactive ligand, sacrifice the animal after a specified time interval, and then measure the radioactivity present with radiographic film. The obvious disadvantage is that one can only measure the amount of of a substance present at one particular time. The solution that William and Mary, in conjunction with Jefferson Lab, has invented involves ligands labeled with Iodine-125 injected into a small mouse. The detector is a position sensitive scintillator and photomultiplier tube connected through discriminator electronics to a CAMAC crate to a ``Blue and White'' Macintosh running KMAX software. Data analysis is accomplished with software written in the IDL development environment. Such a detector requires a knowledge of imaging physics, image reconstruction techniques, and a computer science background. Current planned improvements include rotation of the detector to allow for multiple tomographic projections, addition of smaller detectors for better sensitivity, and the modification of the software to allow for a general user to perform data analysis.