BBC:
A team from the US and Canada has built a miniaturized scanner
that can perform positron emission tomography (PET) on mobile,
wide-awake rats. The new scanner, which is described in
a
paper in
Nature Methods, is potentially useful because PET is a
molecular probe. Thanks to the use of radioactive tracers, PET
can locate concentrations in the brain of neurotransmitters and
other biochemically significant molecules. Subjecting lab rats
to PET scans usually entails immobilizing and anesthetizing
them, a restriction that limits the kinds of brain activity
that can be studied. The new scanner is small enough and light
enough that it can be attached to a rat's head while the rat
moves about.
