Preclinical investigation of potential use of thymidine phosphorylase-targeting tracer for diagnosis of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis.

Introduction: Although liver biopsy is the gold standard for the diagnosis of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), it has several problems including high invasiveness and sampling errors. Therefore, the development of alternative methods to overcome these disadvantages is strongly required. In this study, we evaluated the potential use of our tracer targeting thymidine phosphorylase (TYMP), 5-[I]iodo-6-[(2-iminoimidazolidinyl)methyl]uracil ([I]IIMU) for the diagnosis of NASH.