A Finnish study published on Monday proposed that an imaging method known as a PET scan may enable doctors to determine whether a person has “plaques” in the brain that are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. Thus, PET may provide doctors with a non-invasive means of detecting Alzheimer’s disease-related brain plaques.

In Alzheimer’s the brain tissue of the affected develop abnormal clumps called amyloid plaques the presence of which can be detected only through analysis of brain tissue samples obtained when a patient is alive or after death.

A small study led by Dr. Ville Leinonen of the University of Kuopio in Finland revealed that positron emission tomography, or PET, imaging can detect the plaques.

The study involved 10 people, all of whom had undergone a brain biopsy because of a suspected anomalous increase of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain. All 10 patients were injected with a marker called carbon 11-labeled Pittsburgh Compound B ([11c]PiB) before having a 90-minute PET scan. The patients with beta-amyloid plaques were found to have a higher uptake of the marker in certain brain areas than patients without the plaques.

“The study supports the use of [11C] PiB PET in the evaluation of beta-amyloid deposition in, for example, mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease or normal-pressure hydrocephalus,” the researchers wrote.

“It’s very promising,” said Leinonen, whose study was published in the American Medical Association’s journal Archives of Neurology.

“It’s not 100 percent, but the correlation was very good,” Leinonen said.