PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Ilona Polvoy
AU  - Robert R. Flavell
AU  - Oren S. Rosenberg
AU  - Michael A. Ohliger
AU  - David M. Wilson
TI  - Nuclear Imaging of Bacterial Infection: The State of the Art and Future Directions
AID  - 10.2967/jnumed.120.244939
DP  - 2020 Dec 01
TA  - Journal of Nuclear Medicine
PG  - 1708--1716
VI  - 61
IP  - 12
4099  - http://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/61/12/1708.short
4100  - http://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/61/12/1708.full
SO  - J Nucl Med2020 Dec 01; 61
AB  - Increased mortality rates from infectious diseases is a growing public health concern. Successful management of acute bacterial infections requires early diagnosis and treatment, which are not always easy to achieve. Structural imaging techniques such as CT and MRI are often applied to this problem. However, these methods generally rely on secondary inflammatory changes and are frequently not specific to infection. The use of nuclear medicine techniques can add crucial complementary information, allowing visualization of infectious pathophysiology beyond morphologic imaging. This review will discuss the current structural and functional imaging techniques used for the diagnosis of bacterial infection and their roles in different clinical scenarios. We will also present several new radiotracers in development, with an emphasis on probes targeting bacteria-specific metabolism. As highlighted by the current coronavirus disease 2019 epidemic, caused by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, similar thinking may apply in imaging viral pathogens; for this case, prominent effects on host proteins, most notably angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, might also provide worthwhile imaging targets.