(July 30, 2002 1:50 p.m. EDT) - New applications of medical imaging techniques are giving doctors unprecedented views of tissues ranging from bones and fat to nerve pathways in the brain, heart muscle and other soft tissue.

It may soon be possible to determine with medical imaging techniques whether a young girl will be susceptible to bone fractures as an adult woman, or if a preteen boy is prone to accumulating fat around the middle that will make him at increased risk for heart disease as a grown man.

Imaging technology developed by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development is allowing physicians and researchers to make detailed, three-dimensional maps of soft tissue.

Scientists in Sweden and at the University of Pittsburgh have come up with a way to use another brain scanning technique to track the extent of damage from amyloid plaque deposits in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Scientists in California reported Tuesday they were able to detect gender-based disease susceptibility at an early age - 5 to 10 years old.

"Common adult diseases, such as osteoporosis, type II diabetes and hypertension, have their antecedents during childhood," said Dr. Vincente Gilsanz, a professor of radiology at Children's Hospital and the University of California-Los Angeles.

"And we can measure in children some of the traits associated with negative health outcomes in adults, such as low bone density and high abdominal fat," he added.

Gilsanz and colleagues reported in the journal Radiology that they used multiple X-ray scans to measure fat, muscle and bone in 31 pairs of healthy Caucasian boys and girls between 5 and 10 years old, all matched for age, height and weight.

They found that, over all, the girls had significantly greater total fat and significantly less musculature and smaller bones than the boys. While such differences had been noted in older children before, the new study was the first to document that they could be measured in youngsters before puberty.

"So, we can attribute these risk factors, in part, to the different accumulation of bone and visceral fat during growth," said Gilsanz. "There is no question that in years to come, imaging will play a tremendous role in identifying people at risk for certain diseases."

At the National Institute of Child Health, scientists developed diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging to produce high-quality three-dimensional images of the inside of the body by measuring the random motion of water molecules within particular tissues.

The technology uses this information to produce intricate, 3-D images of each particular tissue's organization and local structure. It already has been used to diagnose stroke and measure subtle changes in the brain related to Lou Gehrig's disease, multiple sclerosis and epilepsy, and for plotting brain surgery, as well as to study brain development in infants and children.

"If we could establish a strong connection between an anatomical deficit and a particular disorder, it might be possible one day to also use DT-MRI as a screening tool," said Peter Basser, principal inventor of the technique and a senior researcher at the institute.

The institute announced Monday that it was licensing commercial rights to the technology to GE Medical Systems.

For the Alzheimer's test, announced at a meeting in Stockholm last week, the advance is not really the PET brain scan itself but a new chemical compound that can pass through the bloodstream into the brain and "tag" specific amyloid deposits "so small that individual plaque is not visible to the human eye," said Dr. William Klunk of the University of Pittsburgh.

Although the first human test of the radioactive material was conducted just five months ago, researchers hope the scans will eventually allow doctors to identify people at the very earliest stages of Alzheimer's.

The plaque begins to accumulate at least 10 years before any symptoms occur, and many researchers have been looking for drugs and other treatments that could keep the material from forming or developing the tangles around nerve connections.