Molecular imaging in stem cell-based therapies of cardiac diseases.
In the past 15years, despite that regenerative medicine has shown great potential for cardiovascular diseases, the outcome and safety of stem cell transplantation has shown controversial results in the published literature. Medical imaging might be useful for monitoring and quantifying transplanted cells within the heart and to serially characterize the effects of stem cell therapy of the myocardium. From the multiple available noninvasive imaging techniques, magnetic resonance imaging and nuclear imaging by positron (PET) or single photon emission computer tomography (SPECT) are the most used clinical approaches to follow the fate of transplanted stem cells in vivo. In this article, we provide a review on the role of different noninvasive imaging modalities and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. We focus on the different in-vivo labeling and reporter gene imaging strategies for stem cell tracking as well as the concept and reliability to use imaging parameters as noninvasive surrogate endpoints for the evaluation of the post-therapeutic outcome.
['Li|Xiang|X|', 'Hacker|Marcus|M|']
D000818:Animals D006321:Heart D006331:Heart Diseases D006801:Humans D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging D057054:Molecular Imaging D049268:Positron-Emission Tomography D033581:Stem Cell Transplantation D015899:Tomography, Emission-Computed, Single-Photon
Imaging Cardiovascular disease Stem cells therapy Magnetic resonance imaging Nuclear imaging Cell tracking Endpoints of imaging