Single Ho³⁺‐Doped Upconversion Nanoparticles for High‐Performance <i>T</i>₂‐Weighted Brain Tumor Diagnosis and MR/UCL/CT Multimodal Imaging

Abstract

Multimodal bio‐imaging has attracted great attention for early and accurate diagnosis of tumors, which, however, suffers from the intractable issues such as complicated multi‐step syntheses for composite nanostructures and interferences among different modalities like fluorescence quenching by MRI contrast agents (e.g., magnetic iron oxide NPs). Herein, the first example of T 2 ‐weighted MR imaging of Ho 3+ ‐doped upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) is presented, which, very attractively, could also be simultaneously used for upconversion luminesence (UCL) and CT imaging, thus enabling high performance multi‐modal MRI/UCL/CT imagings in single UCNPs. The new finding of T 2 ‐MRI contrast enhancement by integrated sensitizer (Yb 3+ ) and activator (Ho 3+ ) in UCNPs favors accurate MR diagnosis of brain tumor and provides a new strategy for acquiring T 2 ‐MRI/optical imaging without fluorescence quenching. Unlike other multi‐phased composite nanostructures for multimodality imaging, this Ho 3+ ‐doped UCNPs are featured with simplicity of synthesis and highly efficient multimodal MRI/UCL/CT imaging without fluorescence quenching, thus simplify nanostructure and probe preparation and enable win–win multimodality imaging.