The importance of early-stage diagnosis and in situ monitoring of lesion regions and transportation of bioactive molecules has a pivotal effect on the successful treatment, reducing side effects, and increasing the chances of surviving in serious diseases like cancer. This strongly depends on development of contrast agents and biomarkers as well as appropriate use of bioimaging techniques. Because of their exceptionally high surface area and porosity, nanoscale metal-organic frameworks (NMOFs) have been subjected to numerous research in biomedical domain as drug carriers, diagnostic and therapeutic agents, and biosensors. This review provides a summary on recent advancements in the usage of MOFs as nanoscale platforms for biomedical imaging via magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, computed tomography (CT), single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), fluorescence (FL) imaging, positron emission tomography (PET), photoacoustic (PA), and photothermal (PT) imaging modalities. The beginning of each section describes the principles of imaging techniques, which is followed by presenting the recent reports on MOFs for monomodal and multimodal imaging, as well as information on: i) how to synthesize the MOFs and modify their surface, and ii) the utilization of bioimaging or theranostics applications.

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