Functional imaging of astrocyte activity

Astrocytes have become known to play a central role in various neuroinflammatory diseases.The evaluation of astrocyte activity using functional imaging is becoming more important.Glucose metabolism or oxygen metabolism in the brain can be assessed using the established clinical imaging methods of F-18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography(PET)and O-15 PET,respectively.However,until recently,the highly specific evaluation of metabolic activity in astrocytes has never been applied clinically.Since acetate is selectively taken up and metabolized by astrocytes,its usefulness as a tracer for measuring astrocyte activity has been proposed in basic research.