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Updated: Aug 2, 2025

Whole Body and Regional Quantification of Active Human Brown Adipose Tissue Using 18F-FDG PET/CT
Published on: April 1, 2019
Imaging Brown Adipose Tissue with TSPO PET Tracers in Preclinical Animal Studies
Biyue Zhu1, Steven H Liang2, Chongzhao Ran3
1Molecular Imaging Laboratory, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Abstract:
Brown adipose tissue (BAT) is closely associated with thermogenesis and related to numerous diseases, including type 2 diabetes, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), and obesity. Using molecular imaging technologies to monitor BAT could facilitate etiology elucidation, disease diagnosis, and therapeutics development. Translocator protein (TSPO), an 18 kDa protein that mainly locates on the outer mitochondrial membrane, has been proven as a promising biomarker for monitoring BAT mass. Here, we lay out the steps for imaging BAT with TSPO PET tracer [18F]-DPA in mouse studies.
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