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A variety of radiolabeled amino acids have been used for imaging brain tumors. FET and MET have been the most widely used amino acid tracers. Amino acid tracers can be used for detection, tumor grading, targeting biopsy, and evaluation of response. Fluorothymidine (FLT) is a nucleoside thymidine analog. Assessment of treatment response in gliomas is very challenging. Amino acid tracers have been proven to be more appropriate. FET PET/CT offers high diagnostic power in this scenario. FET PET with additional dynamic data analysis was significantly superior to conventional MRI in discriminating tumor recurrence from post-therapeutic changes. The present literature in neuroimaging using PET highlights the ability of amino acid PET to quantify biological responses to treatment and allows its application to monitor patients to identify early disease relapse and response to treatment. However, the diagnostic impact of amino acid PET needs to be compared with a variety of advanced MR imaging techniques to develop the most accurate and useful multi-modal biomarkers possible.

Brain imaging is one of the valuable applications of the hybrid PET/MRI given the anatomical and physiological complexity of the brain and the subtlety of the neurological changes that accompany many of the neurodegenerative, epileptic, and oncological diseases. The limited resolution of CT in imaging brain makes the MRI the ideal modality for neuroimaging. This resulted in growing interest in the medical, physics, and pharmaceutical communities to develop novel radiopharmaceuticals and apply new MRI sequences for early diagnosis, predicting the behavior and having a better insight of the neurological disorders. This chapter provides a concise overview of the combined PET/MRI clinical uses in neuroimaging of patients with neurodegenerative, epileptic and brain neoplastic diseases. It also compares its advantages and disadvantages to those of other available imaging modalities.

Although FASD is characterized by physical, behavioral and cognitive deficits that provide compelling evidence of brain damage, routine clinical brain imaging (e.g. magnetic resonance imaging; MRI) often yields non-significant findings that add little insight into the diagnostic process. Nonetheless, research studies using advanced methods have identified numerous abnormalities of brain structure when comparing groups of individuals with FASD to groups of typically developing individuals, including brain volume reductions and abnormalities of cortical thickness and white matter microstructure. In addition, several studies have identified group-level associations between abnormal brain structure and cognitive performance, degree of prenatal alcohol exposure, or other key clinical metrics. This chapter summarizes some of these key findings, highlighting how MRI has advanced our understanding of FASD while also discussing its current limitations as a biomarker of prenatal alcohol exposure.

Large-scale spatiotemporal activity patterns in neocortex have been observed since the first attempts of simultaneous multichannel recording (e.g. Lilly, Am J Physiol 176:493–504, 1954, [20], Lilly and Cherry, J Neurophysiol 17:521–532, 1954, [21], Lilly and Cherry, J Neurophysiol 18:18–32, 1954, [22]) and are now regularly reported by studies using appropriate techniques on both microscopic Grun and Rotter, Analysis of parallel spike trains, 2010, [12] and macroscopic spatial scales Freeman and Quiroga, Imaging brain function with EEG. Advanced temporal and spatial analysis of electroencephalographic signals, 2013, [10].