Radiotracers for Neurodegenerative Diagnosis and Nuclear Waste Remediation
This community develops and evaluates radiopharmaceuticals for imaging neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, while also engineering materials to capture and remove radioactive heavy metals from industrial waste streams.
The work centers on the synthesis and clinical application of technetium and rhenium complexes, specifically for PET and SPECT imaging of amyloid plaques, tau tangles, and dopamine transporters. A parallel strand focuses on the inorganic chemistry of rhenium, including the design of selective adsorbents and ion-imprinted materials for extracting perrhenate from wastewater and acidic byproducts. Recent research integrates machine learning and deep learning to quantify imaging data, alongside the development of plasma biomarkers such as phospho-tau and amyloid-beta ratios to support non-invasive diagnostic workflows.
The community constitutes 22.6% of all tracked technetium research and 15.3% of rhenium research, with 4,172 and 3,286 papers respectively.
The community comprises 17,522 papers, published primarily in the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, Inorganic Chemistry, and Clinical Nuclear Medicine.
Recent work includes the development of new PET quantification pipelines for amyloid and tau, the optimization of technetium-based tumor detection agents, and the recovery of rhenium from copper-molybdenum smelting waste.