As optoacoustic tomography (OT) emerges as a mainstream pre-clinical imaging modality, understanding the relationship between optoacoustic and other imaging biomarkers in the context of the underlying tissue biology becomes vitally important. Complementary insight into tumour vasculature and hypoxia can be gained using OT alongside magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based techniques. To evaluate the relationship between these metrics and the relative performance of the two modalities in assessment of tumour physiology, co-registration of their output imaging data is required. Unfortunately, this poses a significant challenge due to differences in animal positioning during imaging. Here, we present an integrated framework for registration of OT and MR image data in mice. Our framework combines a novel MR animal holder, to improve animal positioning during imaging, and a landmark-based software co-registration algorithm. We demonstrate that our protocol significantly improves registration of both body and tumour contours between these modalities, enabling more precise multi-modal tumour characterisation.

随着光声断层扫描（OT）成为主流临床前成像方式，了解光声与其他成像生物标志物在基础组织生物学背景下的关系变得至关重要。使用 OT 和基于磁共振成像 (MRI) 的技术可以补充了解肿瘤脉管系统和缺氧。为了评估这些指标与两种方式在肿瘤生理学评估中的相对性能之间的关系，需要共同配准它们的输出成像数据。不幸的是，由于成像过程中动物定位的差异，这提出了重大挑战。在这里，我们提出了一个用于注册小鼠 OT 和 MR 图像数据的集成框架。我们的框架结合了新颖的 MR 动物支架（以改善成像过程中的动物定位）和基于地标的软件联合注册算法。我们证明，我们的方案显着改善了这些模式之间身体和肿瘤轮廓的配准，从而实现更精确的多模式肿瘤表征。