With the advent of molecular imaging, it will be possible to detect these changes prior to the manifestation of disease.
With recent advances in the field of molecular imaging, it is now possible to non-invasively monitor transgene expression in cells in vivo using genetically encoded reporters.
Since differential erosion rates can put a damper on molecular depth profiling and 3-dimensional molecular imaging, it is logical to question whether this approach is meaningful for characterizing single biological cells.
MR does not require ionizing radiation and owns a great potential in molecular imaging, but it has its own limitations in speed, cost, and potential renal toxicity with the use of Gd-based contrast agents.
Furthermore, the multiplicity of metabolic fates for pyruvate makes it an ideal substrate for molecular imaging, as it can report on a host of enzyme-catalyzed reactions in living systems.
(ii) Another advantage of IMS is that because it is a type of a molecular imaging technique, it can yield unexpected results that otherwise cannot be obtained by analysis of dissected tissues only from predefined regions.
As a result, for many molecular imaging applications, it is highly desirable to develop and synthesize photoacoustic/fluorescence dual-modality nanoprobes.
However, lately with the advance of radiochemistry and of molecular imaging technology, it became evident that PET could help novel drug development process.
c-MET-targeted molecular imaging makes it possible to visualize the abnormal alteration of c-MET expression in vivo and in real time, with the potential applications such as patient screening for c-MET-targeted therapeutics, monitoring therapeutic effects, evaluating prognosis, and analysis for resistance mechanism.
The A3R is a promising target for molecular imaging, since it is involved in many of the body's cytoprotective functions and changes of the expression leads to a variety of pathologies, especially neurological and affective disorders, cardiac diseases, oncological diseases and inflammation processes [29 31].
However, because of the limited availability of this molecular imaging technique, it does not allow routine staging after surgery.
