A new imaging technique has the potential to detect neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, in its earliest stages, allowing doctors to diagnose and treat patients more quickly .
The imaging methodology, called super-resolution, combines positional emission tomography (PET) with an external motion tracking device to create highly detailed images of the brain.
PET
In PET images of the brain, the quality of the images is often limited by unwanted movements of the patient during the scan . In this study , the researchers used super-resolution to take advantage of subjects’ normally unwanted head movement to improve resolution on brain PET.
While this super-resolution technique has only been tested in preclinical studies, researchers are currently working to extend it to human subjects. Looking ahead, the authors point to the significant impact that super-resolution can have on brain disorders, specifically Alzheimer’s disease:
Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by the presence of tangles made of tau protein. These tangles begin to accumulate very early in Alzheimer’s disease, sometimes decades before symptoms, in very small regions of the brain.