手术切除和消融疗法已被证明能够达到小于3厘米的肝癌根治的目的;但是，直径小于2厘米的微小肝癌病灶仍然具有诊断和治愈的挑战性，因为肿瘤内无法生成新的血管。新出现的证据表明，光学分子成像与纳米探针结合可以从分子和细胞水平检测微小的癌症，并通过纳米颗粒的光热效应实时杀死癌细胞，从而实现根治的目标。在本研究中，我们设计和合成了多组分和多功能ICG-CuS-Gd@BSA-EpCAM纳米颗粒（NPs），对微小肝癌具有强大的抗肿瘤效应。通过皮下和原位肝癌异种移植小鼠模型，我们发现，ICG和CuS-Gd@BSA等NPs的组分对消灭微小肝癌具有协同的光热效应。我们还发现，ICG-CuS-Gd@BSA-EpCAM NPs显示出荧光成像、磁共振成像和光声成像的三重模式功能，在近红外光照射下实现了微小肝癌的定向检测和光热治疗。综上所述，我们的研究表明，ICG-CuS-Gd@BSA-EpCAM NPs与光学成像技术相结合可能是一种潜在的方法，可通过光热效应检测和非侵入性根治微小肝癌。

Surgical resection and ablation therapy have been shown to achieve the purpose of a radical cure for liver cancer with a size of less than 3 cm; however, tiny liver cancer lesions of diameters smaller than 2 cm remain challenging to diagnose and cure due to the failure of the generation of new blood vessels within tumors. Emerging evidence has revealed that optical molecular imaging combined with nanoprobes can detect tiny cancer from the perspective of molecular and cellular levels and kill cancer cells by the photothermal effect of nanoparticles in real time, thereby achieving radical goals. In the present study, we designed and synthesized multicomponent and multifunctional ICG-CuS-Gd@BSA-EpCAM nanoparticles (NPs) with a potent antineoplastic effect on tiny liver cancer. Using subcutaneous and orthotopic liver cancer xenograft mouse models, we found that the components of the NPs, including ICG and CuS-Gd@BSA, showed synergistic photothermal effects on the eradication of tiny liver cancer. We also found that the ICG-CuS-Gd@BSA-EpCAM NPs exhibited triple-modal functions of fluorescence imaging, magnetic resonance imaging, and photoacoustic imaging, with targeted detection and photothermal treatment of tiny liver cancer under near-infrared light irradiation. Together, our study demonstrates that the ICG-CuS-Gd@BSA-EpCAM NPs in combination with optical imaging technique might be a potential approach for detecting and noninvasively and radically curing tiny liver cancer by the photothermal effect.