HomeNewsLatest Health and Medical NewsHandy Tech: 99mTc-Maraciclatide

Handy Tech: 99mTc-Maraciclatide

If you’ve been following our special series ‘from lab to clinic’, you’ll know that 99 mTc-maraciclatide is an imaging molecule currently in development for endometriosis.The growing blood vessel labelling agent is also proving an effective marker for rheumatoid arthritis.

Meet Me in Morocco

This month Kings College London medical imaging experts showed off their latest results at the 2024 Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society (MICCAI) meeting in Morocco.

The team led by Professors Andrew Reader and Gary Cook of the School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, King’s College London (KCL) presented data showing that 99 mTc-Maraciclatide accumulates distinctly in regions around arthritic joints to pinpoint the location of inflammation. Encouragingly, this demonstrates a straightforward and clear imaging method for radiologists to spot problem areas when a patient is sent for assessment.

Rheumatoid Arthritis Imaging

The big news, however, was that the lab’s representative, Robert Cobb, reported that the team had used 99 mTc-Maraciclatide imaging to develop a new training method to teach automated radiology software how to classify examples of rheumatoid arthritis. The novel approach employed generative AI image recognition software to distinguish between a high inflammation signal, a low inflammation signal and the low-level fuzz in the background. In simple terms, the AI model could tell the difference between a spot of inflammation on a knuckle joint, and the ghostly outline of the rest off the hand.

The researchers showed the AI program 8000 pictures generated by the SPEC/CT system of hands. Radiologists carefully manually labelled the images with the location and intensity of signal. They showed the AI model varying levels of inflammation in lots of different shaped hands. The labelling and image combinations taught the model how to recognize splotches that look like inflammation, versus splodges that looked like background noise.

The program was able to sort the images into sets with a lot of inflammation, low levels of inflammation and baseline levels of inflammation in non-arthritic hands AKA ‘normal’.

Watch this space for the next 99 mTc-Maraciclatide update.

Joanna Mulvaney PhD
Joanna Mulvaney PhD
Joanna Mulvaney worked as a bench researcher for much of her career before transitioning to science communication. She completed a PhD in developmental biology focusing on cell signaling in cardiogenesis at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, before moving on to study axial skeleton development and skeletal myogenesis at King’s College London and regeneration of auditory cells in the ear at University of California San Diego Medical School, USA and Sunnybrook Research Institute, Toronto, Canada. When it comes to scientific information, her philosophy is: make it simple, make it clear, make it useful.

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