Single-walled carbon nanotubes in biomedical imaging

This article reviews the latest developments in using single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) for biomedical imaging. SWNTs with a number of unique intrinsic optical properties have been widely used as contrast agents in Raman imaging, near-infrared (NIR) fluorescence imaging and photoacoustic imaging in vitro and in vivo. More imaging functionalities including positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging can be achieved by either utilizing external labels or the metal impurities of nanotube samples. Although there is still a long way to go before SWNTs are ready for clinical use, they are promising nanomaterials with great potential in multimodality biomedical imaging.