Imaging techniques to evaluate cell therapy in peripheral artery disease: state of the art and clinical trials

Cell-based therapies, as potential approach to cure peripheral artery disease (PAD), have been clinically investigated after promising results in preclinical models. The so far published studies are very heterogeneous, as different cell sources, cell types, amounts of administered cells and delivering strategies have been used. Overall, cell therapies for PAD bring about a general improvement of patient's clinical condition, even though conclusions cannot be established due to the small size and non-randomized design of these trials. In this context, non-invasive imaging techniques, aimed to monitor angiogenesis and neovascularization after cell therapy, will help the follow-up of clinical studies. However, still much work is needed to establish advanced imaging procedure to overcome the limitation of the current techniques and to accumulate more data in large populations of patients. Here, we report the main imaging techniques employed to evaluate the outcome of the different cell-based therapies in PAD. Moreover, we focus on both published and ongoing clinical trials utilizing cell therapy in PAD.