Speaker
Description
How Multimodal Imaging Is Redefining Precision Medicine
A. Cedola1, F. Palermo1
1CNR-Institute of Nanotechnology
c/o Physics Dept Sapienza University
Piazzale Aldo Moro 5 00185 Rome-Italy
Corresponding author: e-mail
The advent of multimodal imaging strategies is fundamentally transforming precision medicine by enabling comprehensive, multi-scale characterization of biological tissues across health and disease. The integrative use of Electron Microscopy (EM), X-ray Phase-Contrast Tomography (XPCT), and Histology provides a synergistic framework that bridges macroscopic tissue architecture and nanoscale ultrastructural detail within a single, spatially coherent analytical pipeline.
The correlative and sequential application of these modalities on the same specimen, Correlative Multimodal Imaging (CMI), enables the identification of structural biomarkers invisible to any single technique alone.
We focused on a compelling application of this multimodal approach neurodegenerative diseases, where the complexity of pathological mechanisms demands resolution across multiple biological scales. Of relevance is the emerging role of the gut-brain axis in Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Growing evidence implicates intestinal dysbiosis, compromised gut barrier integrity, and peripheral neuroinflammatory signaling as early and potentially causative contributors to AD pathogenesis, preceding canonical hallmarks such as amyloid-β plaques and neurofibrillary tau tangles. CMI offers a unique opportunity to simultaneously characterize enteric nervous system ultrastructure, intestinal epithelial tight-junction remodeling via EM, three-dimensional mucosal architecture via XPCT, and neuroinflammatory cell profiling via immunohistochemistry, establishing structural correlates of gut-brain miscommunication at unprecedented resolution.
By integrating these complementary modalities, multimodal imaging is redefining precision diagnostics, enabling mechanistically informed patient stratification, accelerating biomarker discovery, and opening new therapeutic windows in complex multisystem disorders such as AD.
The figure below shows one of our findings on gut investigation using XPCT.