Overview
The area of molecular imaging has matured over the past decade and is still growing rapidly. Many concepts developed for molecular biology and cellular imaging have been successfully translated to in vivo imaging of intact organisms. Molecular imaging enables the study of processes at a molecular level in their full biological context. Due to the high specificity of the molecular readouts the approach bears a high potential for diagnostics. It is fair to say that molecular imaging has become an indispensable tool for biomedical research and drug discovery and development today.This volume familiarizes the reader with the concepts of imaging and molecular imaging in particular. Basic principles of imaging technologies, reporter moieties for the various imaging modalities, and the design of targeted probes are described in the first part. The second part illustrates how these tools can be used to visualize relevant molecular events in the living organism.
