Handbook of Biomedical Optics

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31.1 Introduction

e goal of molecular imaging is to identify or monitor specic

molecular processes in target cells or tissue. In vivo, these events

may be biological functions of normal physiology or signatures

of pathological processes. e expression levels of a target mol-

ecule such as protein receptor or the activity of disease-related

enzymes can be used diagnostically to give information about

a disease state such as disease staging or predicting response to

specic therapies.

Molecular reporter systems are molecular probes that enable

specic detection of biochemical signatures in living cells or

organisms with minimal interr ...