W. Phillip Law

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/62823

#### **Abstract**

This chapter is a review of the most common radiotracers currently used in clinical brain tumour imaging, and an update of future potentially useful radiotracers for imaging brain tumours with positron emission tomography (PET). It will focus mainly on glioma —the most common type of primary brain tumour—and intracranial metastases, as the cause of the majority of morbidity and mortality in neurooncology. Emerging data support the use of somatostatin analogue PET in the treatment planning and surveil‐ lance of meningiomas. There is currently a limited role of PET in other non-glial brain neoplasms including neuronal tumours, pineal and pituitary tumours, germ cell tumours and embryonal tumours (PNET, neuroblastoma). Finally, the newest hybrid imaging modality of PET/MRI and the promise it holds for obtaining state-of-the-art structural and functional imaging data simultaneously, are concisely reviewed.

**Keywords:** PET, molecular imaging, brain tumour, neurooncology, radiotracer
