We present a novel PET imaging approach for capturing dopamine fluctuations induced by cigarette smoking. Subjects smoke in the PET scanner. Dynamic PET images are modeled voxel-by-voxel in time by lp-ntPET, which includes a time-varying dopamine term. The results are 'movies' of dopamine fluctuations in the striatum during smoking.
Morris, E. D., Kim, S. J., Sullivan, J. M., Wang, S., Normandin, M. D., Constantinescu, C. C., Cosgrove, K. P. Creating Dynamic Images of Short-lived Dopamine Fluctuations with lp-ntPET: Dopamine Movies of Cigarette Smoking. J. Vis. Exp. (78), e50358, doi:10.3791/50358 (2013).