Understanding Psychiatric Disorders Through Functional Brain Imaging

Functional brain imaging technologies, such as positron emission tomography (PET) and single-photon emission tomography (SPECT), are widely used to measure hemodynamic and metabolic neural events associated with psychiatric illness or an experimental challenge. Psychopharmacologic treatment produces adaptive changes in neural circuitry that correspond with changes in behavior. This concept has been tested in studies that were designed to visualize changes in neural receptors and transporters subsequent to pharmacotherapy. The use of functional neuroimaging in distributed neural processing studies offers the hope of identifying individuals at risk of developing psychiatric disorders in addition to treatment responders and non-responders. This technology also has the potential to identify new treatments and novel uses for existing treatments.