Structure-Function-Based Quantitative Brain Image Analysis

Abstract

Many neurodegenerative dementias produce significant alterations in the brain that are often not detectable by neurologic tests or with structural imaging. PET is ideally suited for monitoring cell/molecular events early in the course of a disease as well as during pharmacologic therapy. During the past 2 decades, molecular neuroimaging using PET and magnetic resonance (MR) has advanced elegantly and steadily gained importance in the clinical and research arenas. Software- and hardware-based multimodality brain imaging allowing the correlation between anatomic and molecular information has revolutionized clinical diagnosis and now offers unique capabilities for the clinical neuroimaging community and neuroscience researchers at large.

Keywords: Image fusion; MRI; Molecular brain imaging; Neurodegenerative disease; PET; PET-MRI; Quantification; Structural brain imaging.