Clinical Applications of PET/MRI in Brain Imaging

Abstract

Brain imaging is one of the valuable applications of the hybrid PET/MRI given the anatomical and physiological complexity of the brain and the subtlety of the neurological changes that accompany many of the neurodegenerative, epileptic, and oncological diseases. The limited resolution of CT in imaging brain makes the MRI the ideal modality for neuroimaging. This resulted in growing interest in the medical, physics, and pharmaceutical communities to develop novel radiopharmaceuticals and apply new MRI sequences for early diagnosis, predicting the behavior and having a better insight of the neurological disorders. This chapter provides a concise overview of the combined PET/MRI clinical uses in neuroimaging of patients with neurodegenerative, epileptic and brain neoplastic diseases. It also compares its advantages and disadvantages to those of other available imaging modalities.