Infectious Disease Imaging

Given the continued high disease burden of infectious diseases worldwide, with communicable diseases still accounting for most deaths in low-income economies, medical imaging can and does play an important role in the diagnosis and monitoring of infectious diseases (WHO: Number of deaths: WORLD by cause. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/, 2015). Imaging provides some fundamental advantages in that it is non-invasive and provides results relatively rapidly. Also, given the variety of modalities, e.g., radiography, ultrasound, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and molecular imaging such as positron emission tomography (PET) and single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), imaging has the potential to provide both basic and highly sophisticated information about the disease processes.