Systems medicine: total body positron emission tomography meets omics

Omics imaging has emerged as an interdisciplinary field focused on integrating data collected from biomedical images and omics analysis. Historically, there is precedent for omics imaging to serve as a superior model for prediction of human diseases, including brain disorders and cancer, versus single technique models (eg, only imaging data or only omics data). Most of the previous studies in the field of omics imaging have focused on single organ analysis. However, the advent of total-body positron emission tomography (PET) imaging for clinical use has the potential to transform this landscape by enabling high sensitivity or high throughput multi-organ analysis with methodologies previously established for analysis of omics datasets, such as connectome and pathway analysis tools. Conversely, traditional omics analysis, which lack spatial and structural multi-organ information, can benefit from total-body PET imaging of molecular targets in vivo across multiple organs in humans. In this commentary, the importance of whole-person research enabled by total-body PET, integration of total-body PET with omics techniques and examples of successful case studies of imaging omics are described. Although the field of imaging omics is relatively new, discoveries already enabled by this field provide seminal evidence of its importance to advance human disease diagnosis, prognosis and treatment.