Applied brain imaging.

摘要

Neuroimaging is increasingly relevant to child and adolescent psychiatrists. Once a set of esoteric research techniques relegated more to the province of a pediatric neurologist or radiologist, brain imaging now has a place in die mainstream of child and adolescent psychiatry. It is already being used widely in the study of psychopathology and normal brain development and shows genuine potential for future use in clinical monitoring and to aid in decision making. Imaging offers a way to measure brain structure and function safely in living children. This has most commonly been done at a single point in time, but scans are now increasingly conducted repeatedly over time measuring the vicissitudes of development to identify the determinants of disease progression and the nature of therapeutic change. More than any previously available neurobiological technique or research tool, imaging offers the opportunity to define the neural systems that mediate the genetic and environmental determinants of brain development with their cognitive, emotional, and behavior consequences. The promise of tracking and predicting the trajectories of an illness and of developing individualized therapeutic interventions for children has never been greater, and it is founded to a large extent on the capacity of imaging techniques to define these pathways that link genes, brain, behavior, and environmental context of a developing child.