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0:00
Hello, my name is William Klunk and
I'm Professor of Psychiatry and
Neurology at the University of
Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
I'm going to talk about imaging amyloid.
Now that we can see it,
what does it all mean?
0:14
We should remember that this is still
a very new field, in fact the first
presentation on the topic was given in
July of 2002 by Henry Engler at the 8th
International Conference on Alzheimer's
disease in Stockholm, Sweden.
It was the Swedish group that coined
the term 'PiB' or Pittsburgh compound-B.
0:35
Although new,
it's an area of rapid research growth,
in what we euphemistically refer to as our
'pibliography' or collection of papers
that refer to the use of pib in amyloid
imaging, you can see an exponential growth
over the past eight years, so that there
are now well over 150 papers and growing.
Of course I won't get to them all, but
I'll try to sample the highlights
to give an overview of the field.
1:02
By way of overview, what I'll be talking
about is: can we really see amyloid?
By that I mean: is there a good
pathological correlation between
what we see in vivo with a PET scan, and
what is actually in the brain that
we can later examine after death.
Then I want to talk
about what it all means,
I'll break these into
two general categories.
The first being to confirm what post
mortem studies have already told us.
There's a wealth of valuable information
from post mortem studies, but
of course this in vivo imaging was
developed to go beyond these limitations.
What we're going to talk about then
are things like longitudinal studies,
and all kinds of things that couldn't
be done with post mortem studies but
can potentially be done with this
new in vivo imaging technology.
