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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2011 Sep 1.
Published in final edited form as: Neuropharmacology. 2010 Apr 14;59(4-5):268–275. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropharm.2010.04.007

Table 1.

Comparison of in vivo imaging techniques for amyloid protein.

Imaging Technique Spatial Resolution (mm) Sensitivity to Aβ Time resolution Imaging region Invasive Agents for imaging
Multiphoton Microscopy 0.001 High sensitivity Fast (Second) Barrel cortex Yes Methoxy-XO4 (Klunk et al., 2002); Thioflavin-S (Bacskai et al., 2001); PIB (Bacskai et al., 2003); fluorescent antibodies 10D5 or 3D6 (Bacskai et al., 2002a)
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) 2–10 Micromolar Slow Whole brain No Nuclear medicine probes (Nordberg, 2008; Ono, 2009) including [11C]PIB, [11C]SB-13, [18F]FDDNP, [123I]IMPY, [18F]BF-227, and [18F]BAY94-9172
Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) 1–10 Lower than PET (non-quantifiable) Slow Whole brain No [123I]IMPY(Kung et al., 2002), [99Tc]-10H3 (Friedland et al., 1997)
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) 0.04–1(Benveniste and Blackband, 2002; Jack et al., 2007) Millimolar Slow (2–10 h at mice models) (Jack et al., 2005) Whole brain No Magnetic contrast agents 19F-containing Congo-red based compound (Higuchi et al., 2005), Put–Gd–Aβ (Poduslo et al., 2002)
NIR spectroscopy 1–3 High sensitivity Fast Whole brain No CRANAD-2 (Ran et al., 2009); AOI-987 (Hintersteiner et al., 2005; Raymond et al., 2008)