Clinical Applications of PET-MRI Technique in Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a neurodegenerative disease that afflicts many people as the most common form of dementia, still lacks effective symptomatic treatments. PET-MRI hybrid imaging technology combines Positron emission tomography (PET) and Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is believed to be helpful for the early screening, diagnosis, disease course monitoring and treatment evaluation of AD, and has a very promising technical prospect. This review reviews the roles of PET and MRI in the diagnosis and monitoring of AD, respectively, and analyzes their advantages and disadvantages. Later, based on previous studies, this review discusses the effects of the two technologies when they are used together, and compares them with each other and PET-Computed Tomography (CT) hybrid imaging technology respectively, indicating that PET and MRI can complement each other and give full play to their respective advantages. After this, the review also discusses the problems and challenges still faced by this hybrid imaging technology. This paper presents the current research status and future research direction of PET-MRI for AD diagnosis and monitoring, which is of great value to its research and application