The goals of experimental neuroscience research are fundamentally to gain mechanistic understanding of the pathology of disease in order to identify appropriate targets for potential pharmacological intervention and evaluation of putative therapies. With the advances in gene manipulation and transgene technologies, we have unprecedented ability to generate animal models of disease that more closely mimic the clinical conditions. Noninvasive techniques capable of investigating altered pathophysiologies are now of paramount importance. Conventional methods that rely on histological and/or immunohistochemical staining demand the selective sacrifices of large cohorts of animals and include inherent assumptions of population homogeneity. Noninvasive imaging offers the obvious attractions of reducing sample sizes, use of individual data for internal.
