Referring Physicians
Overview for Referring Physicians
Molecular Imaging in Diagnosis
Diagnosing and treating disease is becoming increasingly collaborative, with teams of physicians from different specialties working together to develop treatment options and monitor outcomes. This multi-modality focus on diagnostic imaging and treatment of disease provides medical practitioners with the most scientific, cutting edge approach to improving patient care.
How MI Improves Patient Care
Molecular imaging has enormous relevance for patient care: it reveals the clinical biology of the disease process; it personalizes patient care by characterizing specific disease processes in different individuals; and it is useful in drug discovery and development, for example, for studying how drugs are processed by the body and how they affect the body.
The relevance of molecular imaging to disease is demonstrated by the following three examples:
Cardiovascular Disease
Molecular imaging offers unique insights that allow a more personalized approach to evaluation and management of cardiovascular disease conditions. Molecular imaging is used in modeling the flow of blood through the arteries that supply the muscles of the heart, the strength of the pumping action of the heart, the build up of plaque in arteries, clot formation, atherosclerosis, and transplant rejection.
Cancer
By accurately characterizing tumor properties or biological activity, molecular imaging plays a pivotal role in guiding cancer patient management in detection and diagnosis, staging (the extent and location of tumors), assessing therapeutic targets, evaluating response to therapy, and assessing prognosis.
Neurological Disease
Molecular imaging may be a very important tool in the early assessment, evaluation and follow up of patients with neurological diseases. Molecular imaging is playing an increasingly significant role in neurological conditions such as brain tumors, dementia (Alzheimer's and others), movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease, seizure disorders. Psychiatrists are using brain imaging to understand the molecular processes of thought and emotion and to diagnose psychiatric disorders.
