Dopamine and norepinephrine are implicated in the pathophysiology of mental disorders, but non-invasive study of their neuronal function remains challenging. Recent research suggests that neuromelanin-sensitive magnetic resonance imaging (NM-MRI) techniques may overcome this limitation by enabling the non-invasive imaging of the substantia nigra (SN)/ ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopaminergic and locus coeruleus (LC) noradrenergic systems. A review of 19 studies that met the criteria for NM-MRI application in mental disorders found that despite the use of heterogeneous sequence parameters and metrics, nearly all studies reported differences in contrast ratio (CNR) of LC or SN/VTA between patients with mental disorders and healthy controls. These findings suggest that NM-MRI is a valuable tool in psychiatry, but the differences in sequence parameters across studies hinder comparability, and a standardized analysis pipeline is needed to improve the reliability of results. Further research using standardized methods is needed to better understand the role of dopamine and norepinephrine in mental disorders.

多巴胺和去甲肾上腺素与精神障碍的病理生理学有关，但对其神经元功能的非侵入性研究仍然具有挑战性。最近的研究表明，神经黑色素敏感磁共振成像（NM-MRI）技术可以通过对黑质（SN）/腹侧被盖区（VTA）多巴胺能和蓝斑（LC）去甲肾上腺素能系统进行非侵入性成像来克服这一限制。对符合 NM-MRI 在精神障碍中应用标准的 19 项研究的回顾发现，尽管使用了异质序列参数和指标，但几乎所有研究都报告了精神障碍患者之间 LC 或 SN/VTA 对比度 (CNR) 的差异。疾病和健康控制。这些发现表明，NM-MRI 是精神病学中的一个有价值的工具，但不同研究之间序列参数的差异阻碍了可比性，需要标准化的分析流程来提高结果的可靠性。需要使用标准化方法进行进一步研究，以更好地了解多巴胺和去甲肾上腺素在精神障碍中的作用。