Report from the Science Front: The Society for Nuclear Medicine

The Society for Nuclear Medicine continues to set the scientific foundation for brain imaging and our clinical work

Brain views are alive and well at the SNM [Society for Nuclear Medicine] meeting starting Saturday and going thru the week at the voluminous Washington DC Convention Center.  I went up to DC this last  weekend for a great adventure and a day of interesting brain imaging updates with molecular and cellular science thrown in.

I'll touch briefly on some remarkable highlights to keep you posted. [Plan: to get back to non medical treatments for ADD with several posts this forthcoming weekend.] SNM is the main world meeting site for the research crowd on the frontier of functional SPECT and PET imaging, mainly for hearts and brains, but clearly involved in all of nuclear med including veterinary medicine and imaging the entire body.

For a guy like myself with an abiding interest in applied brain science this meeting was for me like a kid in a candy store. I confess I have always been a closet geek, and the cameras, the isotope configurations and the software platforms were mind boggling. Picture the GE PET exhibit for cardiology covering about 15% of the main floor with the newest cameras and the Cedar Sinai software spinning hearts pumping on enormous plasma screens. The busy exhibit hall not only included of the latests technological gear, but reps from the nuclear med societies from Japan, Europe, S. Africa, Australia and New Zealand all showed with their own meeting plans for the year.

All day Saturday the Brain Forum presented a series of papers on the research aspects of using isotopes for Advances in Brain Molecular Imaging. Without waxing pedantic, it was great fun, and much of what we talk about in these posts here at CorePsychBlog is on the table with these many researchers. Some of the topics from the week include:

1. Molecular Basis of Functional Brain Imaging
Mark A. Mintun, MD
2.Molecular Imaging of Brain Function: Reward Systems and Addiction
Alain Dagher
3. Molecular Imaging in Drug Discovery and Development: What PET and SPECT Measurements Can Reveal
Mark Slifstein, PhD
4. How Molecular Imaging Can Advance Drug Discovery and Development
Eugenii A. Rabiner, MD
5. Molecular Brain Imaging – Challenges for Imaging New Neuroreceptor Targets
Alan A. Wilson, PhD
6. New Targets (Non Receptors) for Molecular Imaging of the Brain
Martin G. Pomper, MD, PhD

An encouraging note: the science and practical applications for brain research abound. And, interestingly, the researchers from all over the world see the growing usefulness for brain clinical studies already previously realized with the practical application of cardiac imaging. Dementia, and movement disorders are already clear indicators, they are moving to agree on others. SPECT is scientifically right up there with PET, has more clinical usefulness, lower cost and more availability than PET. For research the edge is with the newer PET isotopes in development that highlight different brain functions.

They are moving more firmly into psych and psychopharm applications by tagging neurotransmitters [like DAT 1, 2, 3 -The dopamine transporter] with isotopes to assess how the dopamine effects of the psychopharm agents are working: using brain scans! -the neurotransmitter receptor sites cluster and can be visualized if the tagged neurotransmitter is occupying the expected brain sites.

OK, this morning's class is over, any questions?