Molecular neuroimaging: the basics.

Molecular Imaging uses imaging technology to demonstrate molecular and cellular events in living organisms. This is in contradistinction to traditional imaging modalities such as CT, which rely on such attributes as physical density to create images. Molecular Imaging is very attractive to both physicians and researchers, as it allows investigation into more basic aspects of disease than traditional modalities. In both research and clinical applications, Molecular Imaging has yielded great insights into disease mechanisms, and allowed patient care to be improved. All Molecular Imaging technologies rely on the same basic model. There is: a) a probe or imaging agent (sometimes endogenous), that b) interacts with the molecular or cellular process of interest, and c) provides signal that is usually amplified in some way, that can d) be used to create an image. This basic model has been adapted in countless ways to investigate biological questions in nearly every area of medicine. Each application typically requires problems to be overcome centered around the fundamental areas of probe design, biological interaction and image generation, with considerable expertise in a variety of fields required to create a useful imaging system. In this review, focusing on Molecular Neuroimaging, we will show examples of such applications in the nervous system. We will successively deal with: Receptors, Neurons, Stem Cells, Tumor Cells, Migroglia, Marker genes, Bioluminescence and Alzheimer related proteins and show examples of each application.