Support:Documents:Examples:Estimate Change of Neurotransmitter

Overview

The changes of endogenous neurotransmitter by PET scanning after a stimulus has been proved with different approaches. In stead of detecting the increase or decrease of a neurotransmitter, it is important to characterize the temporal change of a neurotransmitter after a stimulus. Morris proposed the new technique (called ntPET) for capturing the dynamic changes of a neurotransmitter after a stimulus and demonstrated the ability of this method to reconstruct the temporal characteistics of an enhance in neurotransmitter concentration.

Here we present a general model of ntPET, which can be simplified to Morris' model.

Generally, there are two separate scans for ntPET: one for the rest condition (without any stimuli) and the other for the activation conditon (after a stimulus). C_p is the pasma concentration of tracer for the first scan (the "rest" condtion), F is free (unbound) tracer and B is bound tracer. C_p2 is the pasma concentration of tracer for the second scan (the "activation" condtion), F2 is free (unbound) tracer and B2 is bound tracer. F<pub>en</pub> and B(en) are free and bound by endogenous ligand.