Imaging Approaches to Cerebral Cortex Pathology
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2017
Journal
The Cerebral Cortex in Neurodegenerative and Neuropsychiatric Disorders: Experimental Approaches to Clinical Issues
First Page
57
Last Page
80
URL with Digital Object Identifier
10.1016/B978-0-12-801942-9.00003-3
Abstract
Although many advances in understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms for Alzheimer's disease have been made in the past decades, drug development has failed to significantly improve drug treatment of the disease. This is partly because failed clinical trials have focused on efficacy in terms of cognitive improvement rather than the rigorous evaluation of putative disease mechanisms and the effect of the tested drugs on these mechanisms. The use of imaging biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease, especially those from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), could substantially accelerate the development of novel therapeutics by providing quantitative metrics of disease progression that relate directly to the underlying pathology. Herein, new MRI and PET imaging techniques relevant to neurodegeneration are briefly introduced.