Specific Radiotracers allow to visualize and quantify various receptor systems in the brain and thus help to understand the neurobiological basis for various neurologic and psychiatric diseases. PET allows to detect changes even at preclinical stages of the disease, e.g. in Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease. Regional cerebral glucose metabolism, assessed by FDG-PET, reveals abnormal neuronal activity, e.g. in epilepsy. Sophisticated mathematical analyses are available for network analysis and comparison with other modalities such as functional MRI or EEG. In brain tumors, PET with radiolabeled amino acids is an important complement to MRI, e.g. when identifying the part of the tumor with the highest degree of malignancy before biopsy.

 

Contact: Dr. Matthias Reimold, Dominik Blum