C14 Autoradiography

This is the model which supports the quantitative data analysis for the classical autoradiography with ¹⁴C-deoxyglucose (DG). In fact it is this model from which the PET FDG autoradiography model is derived from, and both have the same underlying assumptions and equations.

In summary, an autoradiographic experiment is performed as follows:

1. The ¹⁴C-labeled deoxyglucose is injected.
2. Blood is sampled and counted until the end of the experiment.
3. The glucose concentration in plasma is measured for one sample.
4. After 50 minutes the deoxyglucose has been trapped and the animal is sacrificed.
5. The brain is isolated, then frozen, and sectioned into very thin slices.
6. The slices are put onto a flat support and mounted into a radioactivity counter together with reference sheets of known activity concentration.
7. The radioactivity is counted during several days.

The result is a set of images either on a conventional film or as a digital file in one of the popular graphic formats. These images can be turned into radioactivity units by a translation table which needs to be obtained from the reference sheets.