Cerenkov Luminescence Imaging at a Glance

Cerenkov luminescence imaging (CLI) is a new technique that has rapidly gained great interest in the molecular imaging field bridging optical imaging and nuclear medicine. Based on the detection of Cerenkov radiation (CR) in biological tissue, in only five years many different applications of CLI were developed spanning from cancer imaging to Alzheimer’s disease and many different approaches were tested in order to increase its potentialities. In particular some efforts were made to transform CLI from a planar imaging technique into a tomographic technique or to shift the CR in a red-infrared radiation more suitable for biological applications. Moreover CLI, developed as a preclinical investigation, has obtained very quickly, interesting results on humans. Here we present a schematic and brief overview of the CLI landscape in order to show the principal results and applications to the biology. More precisely we focused on the potentialities of optical detection of radiotracers excluding the application of Cerenkov radiation obtained with the use of external radiation beam.