Decreased Invasiveness

A hallmark of most of the new diagnostic and therapeutic techniques used in human medicine is the minimal degree of invasiveness that is required to successfully perform a procedure to obtain a given set of data.  In many instances these techniques are applicable in the research environment and can be adopted for use in animals.  A sophisticated example could be the use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging for results that formerly required euthanasia of multiple animals along a time curve to obtain assay tissue.

Today one animal can provide all the information along a given curve.  A less dramatic example is the vascular access device which permits repeated samples or injections in a single animal instead of using several animals.  Invasiveness reduction methods are available in almost every area of biomedical research, and in project design, it is important to identify and use these methods wherever possible.  Not only do they represent an alternative technique, but they generally provide much more consistent and reproducible data.

 

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