Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT)

Abstract

Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging offers the unprecedented opportunity to visualize specific brain chemicals including sites of drug action as well as distinct functional states of the living human brain using radioactive drugs. Over the last three decades, significant advances have been made both in the technology and in the development of novel radiopharmaceuticals for imaging of specific neural receptors and transporters in the living human brain using SPECT. Perfusion SPECT is routinely used for the clinical diagnosis and assessment of several neurological disorders. Neuroreceptor SPECT imaging has been useful in research to begin to identify the chemical state of different neuropsychiatric disorders that result from an imbalance of chemicals in the brain such as alcoholism, Alzheimer’s disease, bipolar disorder, cocaine dependence, major depression, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, and tobacco dependence. While in its youth, neuroreceptor SPECT imaging holds tremendous potential in the clinical setting for the diagnosis of a myriad of psychiatric disorders for which currently there is no biological or chemical diagnostic tool. With continued progress in the development of radiopharmaceuticals and in the technology for the acquisition and image processing of SPECT data, SPECT imaging has the potential to radically change the way that neuropsychiatric disorders are diagnosed and treated.