Infectious disease imaging

Abstract

Given the high disease burden of infectious diseases worldwide, with communicable diseases still accounting for most deaths, medical imaging can play an important role in the diagnosis and monitoring of infectious diseases. Imaging provides some fundamental advantages namely, that it is non-invasive and provides results relatively rapidly. Also, given the variety of modalities, e.g. Xray, ultrasound, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and molecular imaging such as positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), imaging has the potential to provide both basic as well as highly sophisticated information about the disease processes.