Recent Advances in PET Molecular Imaging

摘要

In recent years, PET, which has been considered as a unique tool for understanding brain function in vivo, has become a clinical routine technique for the evaluation of cancer patients. However, new ligands have continued to be labeled with positron emitters for the investigation of brain neurotransmission in neurology and psychiatry but also in oncology. The success of ~(18)F-FDG and its use in all nuclear medicine departments has led to put the emphasis more on ~(18)F radiochemistry than on ~(11)C radiochemistry due to its too short half-life. Many tracers have been tested, such as small organic molecules, peptides, neurotransmitters and modified oligonucleotides to detect specific tumors.In parallel, MRI, which has been first considered as a unique method to show the anatomy of organs has been then widely used in the field of cognitive sciences. Today, MRI seems also very promising to detect malignant tumors by using water diffusion imaging; it could seem that MRI could be in competition with FDG-PET. PET is far from being a methodology that has reached a steady-state. Both instrumentation and radiochemistry are in progress, after the fusion of PET and CT, one can see now the development of PET-MRI hybrid systems that could be very useful not only for brain but also for cancer investigation.