Diagnostic imaging devices in Alzheimer's disease.

This review discusses current imaging devices in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, their neurobiological correlates and future perspectives in the development of these techniques. The challenge of diagnostic devices is to achieve high accuracy in early, preferably preclinical disease stages at the individual patient level. This is of utmost importance for the development of disease-modifying strategies and monitoring their efficacy. In order to achieve this goal, larger validation trials with prospective designs in unselected and mixed patient populations are needed. A combination of imaging methods of different modalities, both structural and functional, will probably provide optimal diagnostic sensitivity in early cases and specificity towards other dementia syndromes, as well as give in vivo insight into the distribution of disease pathology and residual brain capacity for coping with cognitive decline.