ABSTRACT
As recently as the mid-1990s, a new thrust in medical imaging was mounting. Once again, the promise offered by clinical imaging was focusing on more than just pretty pictures of gross anatomy, but rather on visualizing the underlying physiology, and the dysfunction therein, of pathology. The term molecular imaging was adopted to describe this noninvasive quantitative characterization of biologic processes at the molecular (and cellular) level,1,2 and its progress was driven by contemporaneous developments in multiple disciplines, including genomics, proteomics, molecular biology, medical imaging, computer science, and nanotechnology. The great promise of molecular imaging incorporates early (even presymptomatic) disease detection with patient-speci‡c characterization that could lead to personalized medicine.3
