Reporting for CNET, medical blogger Elizabeth Armstrong Moore reports on the Cleveland Clinic's recent Medical Innovation Summit, where the "top ten" medical breakthroughs of 2011 were predicted. Taking top honors was the new brain-imaging compound AV-45, which will aid in early detection of Alzheimer's.

In the post, Moore writes, "To this day, diagnosing the disease while a patient is still alive is tricky, and there is still no cure. But there have been several breakthroughs in understanding how to identify the disease; elevated levels of the telltale protein tau, for instance, can appear decades before outward signs do."

Once injected into a patient, AV-45 crosses the blood-brain barrier and binds with beta-amyloid plaques that are associated with Alzheimer's. PET imaging then enables physicians to see any dyed plaques and make a diagnosis. Whether AV-45 will play the largest role in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's remains to be seen, but it represents a major advance in earlier detection of the disease.

Invented by researchers at Avid Radiopharmaceuticals in Philadelphia, the technique is expected to earn FDA approval in 2011, according to Cleveland Clinic sources.

Read Moore's entire post here:

Check out the other nine breakthroughs announced at the Summit here.