ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the topic of multimodality medical imaging and the context of multimodality imaging in healthcare. It presents the history of multimodality imaging, followed by the most prominent current examples and promising new combinations of technology. The chapter argues that small-animal imaging is the most cost-effective and experimentally efficient way to reduce development time and costs for pharmaceutical research and development. There are many examples in the field of cellular microscopy in which the same cells can be stained for the presence of different receptors. These “hyperspectral cytometry” images are a powerful example of “multimodality” biomedical images. Multimodality instrumentation extracts anatomical, functional, cellular, and molecular information for experimenters in all of these fields without the clinical needs of proving efficacy and justifying reimbursement. The chapter shows how multimodality clinical imaging results from fundamental research efforts beginning with cellular microscopy and ascending through preclinical, small-animal imaging toward clinical human imaging.
