Animal Study of a Newly Designed Metal Airway Brachytherapy Stent Loaded with Radioactive 125I Seeds

Aim: To evaluate dynamic tissue changes after airway stenting (AS) with a newly designed metal brachytherapy stent (BS) loaded with radioactive 125I seeds in normal rabbits.Method: Forty-five normal New Zealand white rabbits were divided into three groups (Group A: stent without seeds; Group B: stent with 0.4 mCi active seeds; Group C: stent with 0.8 mCi active seeds) and underwent AS under C-arm guidance. Then, 5 rabbits were sacrificed from each group at 2, 4, and 8 weeks for further examination. Laboratory tests (including routine blood tests, liver function, kidney function, electrolytes and ROS levels), gross observations, and tissue changes of Masson/hematoxylin-eosin staining, plus immunohistochemistry of α-SMA, NOX4, and TGF-β were performed at each time point.Result: All animals underwent AS successfully without procedure-related death, but one animal died at 6 weeks due to severe pulmonary infection in Group C. Apart from a transient increase in white blood cells (P < 0.05) and a gradual increase in ROS levels (P < 0.05), other blood test items showed no significant changes (P > 0.05). The brachytherapy injury score increased with irradiation dose accumulation (P < 0.05), but tissue hyperplasia at the stent end in Group C was less severe than that in Groups A and B (P < 0.05). Airway lateral fibrosis was observed in all groups by histopathologic analysis; however, fibrosis in Group C was more severe than that in Groups A and B (P < 0.05).Conclusion: The brachytherapy injury score increased with irradiation dose accumulation, while granulation tissue hyperplasia at the stent end was inhibited by 125I brachytherapy within 8 weeks.

Design and fabrication of 125I seeds for brachytherapy using capillary-based microfluidic technique

A new kind of 125I seeds with a core-shell structure were synthesized by an easy assembling–disassembling coaxial capillaries microfluidic device. The dose distribution of a 125I brachytherapy source fabricated by arranging six 125I seeds collinearly within a cylindrical titanium capsule was simulated by modelling the source in a water phantom using Monte Carlo N-Particle Transport code. The influence of the motion and the core size of the 125I seeds on the dose distribution was also studied in this work.