strategy can be used to monitor them as well. tracking radiolabeled glucose is a promising technique because it directly measures a step known to be crucial to inflammation and tumor growth. imaging disease biomarkers by magnetic resonance imaging (mri) main article: molecular imaging mri has the advantages of having very high spatial resolution and is very adept at morphological imaging and functional imaging. mri does have several disadvantages though. first, mri has a sensitivity of around 10−3 mol/l to 10−5 mol/l which, compared to other types of imaging, can be very limiting. this problem stems from the fact that the difference between atoms in the high energy state and the low energy state is very small. for example, at 1.5 tesla, a typical field strength for clinical mri, the difference between high and low energy states is approximately 9 molecules per 2 million. improvements to increase mr sensitivity include increasing magnetic field strength, and hyperpolarization via optical pumping or dynamic nuclear polarization. there are also a variety of signal amplification schemes based on chemical exchange that increase sensitivity. to achieve molecular imaging of disease biomarkers using mri, targeted mri contrast agents with high specificity and high relaxivity (sensitivity) are required. to date, many studies have been devoted to developing targeted-mri contrast agents to achieve molecular imaging by mri. commonly, peptides, antibodies, or small ligands, and small protein domains, such as her-2 affibodies, have been applied to achieve targeting. to enhance the sensitivity of the contrast agents, these targeting moieties are usually linked to high payload mri contrast agents or mri contrast agents with high relaxivities. list of biomarkers in alphabetic order alanine transaminase (alt) body fat percentage body mass index body temperature blood pressure blood sugar level complete blood count creatinine c-reactive protein (inflammation) heart rate hematocrit (hct) hemoglobin (hgb) mean corpuscular volume (mcv) red blood cell count (rbc) thyroid-stimulating hormone (tsh) triglyceride waist circumference waist-to-hip ratio (whr) potential disadvantages not all biomarkers should be used as surrogate endpoints to assess clinical outcomes. biomarkers can be difficult to validate and require different levels of validation depending on their intended use. if a biomarker is to be used to measure the success of a therapeutic intervention, the biomarker should reflect a direct effect of that medicine.