Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: The old order changeth, yielding place to new, …" (From The Idylls of the King, by Alfred Lord Tennyson).But does it?In a recent commentary in this journal, Paul Cumming argues that positron emission tomography (PET) studies no longer seem to be making a significant contribution to understanding the neural substrate of normal human brain function (Cumming, 2014).He does this by providing a brief overview of the PET articles that appeared in NeuroImage during 2012.It is relevant to note that he is not asserting that brain PET is not playing an important role in clinical studies of patients with brain disorders.Indeed, his motivation for submitting his commentary was the decision by NeuroImage to set up a companion journal, NeuroImage Clinical, which resulted in a paucity of PET articles being sent to NeuroImage.His main conclusion is that PET is no longer a highly utilized tool for examining normal brain function.A major cause for this, according to Cumming, is the great expense and technical difficulty of doing PET compared to fMRI.He does not dispute, however, other concerns such as the use of radioactivity in PET, as well as limitations in spatial and temporal resolution.We agree with much of what Dr. Cumming says, and think his article serves a very useful purpose in highlighting some of the changes occurring in the field of neuroimaging.Moreover, the commentary by Siebner et al. (2014) compliments the Cumming paper by addressing some of
Source: NeuroImage
Authors: Barry Horwitz, Kristina Simonyan
Language: English
Subfield: Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,540
OpenAlex ID: W103298028