Currently, the development of radiotracers for in vivo imaging of beta-amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's disease (AD) brains is an important, active area of molecular imaging. Postmortem brains of AD patients reveal neuropathologic features: the presence of beta-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, which contain beta-amyloid peptides and highly phosphorylated tau proteins. Increases in the concentration of beta-amyloid in the course of the disease lead to changes in AD brains. Thus, when used in combination with positron-emission tomography/single-photon emission computed tomography (PET/SPECT), beta-amyloid imaging agents could serve as surrogate markers for the early diagnosis and neuropathogenetic studies of AD. Furthermore, quantitative evaluation of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain could facilitate the evaluation of the efficacy of antiamyloid therapies that are currently being investigated. This paper reviews our research on the development of PET/SPECT imaging agents for in vivo detection of beta-amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's brains.