Molecular imaging of inflammation/infection: The future of disease management

In the field of inflammation/infection imaging, nuclear medicine techniques offer non-invasive tools to detect early patho-physiological changes before the development of anatomical changes detected by radiological procedures and, often, before clinical onset of symptoms. This field has been recently developed with several new radiopharmaceuticals for SPECT and PET used to define new strategies for imaging immune cells as well as pathogens. In particular, we count now several dozens of new radiopharmaceuticals designed for bacterial imaging and new peptides and antibodies for imaging neutrophils, T-cells, B-cells and macrophages. These may have important applications not only for diagnostic purposes but also for prognostic purposes, therapy decision making and for early follow-up of therapy efficacy, thus allowing us to define specific therapies for each individual patient.