Imaging Approaches to Cerebral Cortex Pathology

Although many advances in understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms for Alzheimer\u27s disease have been made in the past decades, drug development has failed to significantly improve drug treatment of the disease. This is partly because failed clinical trials have focused on efficacy in terms of cognitive improvement rather than the rigorous evaluation of putative disease mechanisms and the effect of the tested drugs on these mechanisms. The use of imaging biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease, especially those from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), could substantially accelerate the development of novel therapeutics by providing quantitative metrics of disease progression that relate directly to the underlying pathology. Herein, new MRI and PET imaging techniques relevant to neurodegeneration are briefly introduced