Recent advances in medical functional imaging

Imaging of human body organs has progressed rapidly in the last twenty years. Recent advances have concentrated not just on imaging an organ but on demonstrating various aspects of its function, e.g. images showing active parts of the brain when the eye or ear receive stimuli. Eight functional imaging methods are reviewed here, some being extensions of well-established techniques, others relatively new. Each modality is introduced by an account of its technical basis before presenting some results to show the potentials of these methods