In vivo imaging in psychiatry

To illustrate the ingenious applications to which in vivo imaging can be put, consider the use of PET in the study of hallucinations by Frith and Colleagues in London, and a similar application of fMRI by woodruff's group. Silbersweig and Colleagues used PET to measure brain activity in a group of mentally ill patients who were experiencing hallucinations at the time of scanning. Preliminary results indicated that auditory hallucinations were linked to cortical activation in the left temporal lobe and parts of the left orbital region of the frontal lobe.