| Summary: | Type I diabetes mellitus is primarily an autoimmune disease resulting from selective destruction of insulin producing pancreatic beta cells. Transplantation of purified pancreatic islets is an alternative method for standard insulin therapy of these patients. Though the islet transplantation represents a promising approach for a selected group of patients, there is still a number of problems to be solved and one of them, perhaps the most important, is the lack of a reliable method of transplanted islets monitoring. (...) The results of this experimental study lead to the improvement of the labeling protocol in experimental transplantation and to its translation into clinical research. While different methods such as PET and SPECT will be soon available for shorttime in vivo followup of transplanted pancreatic islet, magnetic resonance imaging represents so far the only available technique able to provide a direct, longterm and reliable visualization of the transplanted islets with sufficient spatial resolution. At present, is this method ready for clinical application.
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