Imaging in neurology research III: Focus on neurotransmitter imaging

Small animal PET is one of the most recently developed and rapidly evolving areas of biomedical imaging, with applications ranging from drug development to the study of molecular events associated with normal and abnormal thought and behavior. The aim of this chapter is to describe how the development of techniques for measuring neurotransmitter concentrations has enabled neurochemical physiology and function (particularly of the brain) to be imaged directly using PET. This compares to traditional PET approaches that have used receptor imaging to measure the static concentration of proteins localized to a particular tissue in the brain. The development of neurotransmitter mapping approaches has opened up the possibility to study the brain in ways that were previously unachievable, with results that are universally comparable.