Understanding by seeing before treating: Present and future of medical imaging

In the last three decades, the development of medical imaging gave a burst to modern medicine. A considerable budget has been affected to develop and equip departments of radiology, nuclear medicine, medical imaging, radiotherapy, and emergency services. Several imaging installations have become intensively and exclusively used by the clinic where most of the imaging exams are performed for diagnoses, while for other imaging installations, the time of usage is shared between the clinical and research departments. However, very few centers restrain their installations to the research groups only, as their budgets are not sufficient to maintain the devices. The increase in medical imaging demand is mainly attributed to: (1) the drastic increase in the technology of electronic and computing sciences, which has made the imaging devices efficient and easy to operate, and (2) to the public and private insurers who consent the reimbursement of the imaging fees for some determined medical exams. Because the imaging modalities are based on different physical properties, they can be used individually, complementary but distinctly, or jointly. Despite their beneficial contribution, the imaging devices should be used with care as they can provoke undesirable effects. The future of the imaging technologies is, a priori, to exploit the full potential of the actual instruments, to target experiments at the molecular level, and to be able to monitor a biological phenomenon at its time of occurrence. In this paper, rapid overview and perspectives are proposed as the field of medical imaging is vast and encompasses several domains of knowledge.