Andrea Varrone, Silvia Morbelli, Valentina Garibotto (Editors). Clinical nuclear medicine in neurology. An Atlas of challenging cases.

Excerpt

The brain is the most evolved and complex human organ, defining the individuality of a person, as a result of peculiar neural networks. Symptoms and prognosis of cerebral diseases depend not only on the individual patients but also on the location and extent of the alterations, with limits that are not always definable. In addition, the disease is expressed, especially in the initial stages, with a prevalent metabolic and/or functional component, sometimes reversible, which, even when the alteration becomes pathologically structured, may be still a relevant part in defining severity and evolution. It is therefore very important to have extremely refined tools available to identify and define brain diseases, especially at their onset, and in this context, molecular and functional imaging has made a fundamental contribution to the diagnosis and clinical setting. …