Nuclear Medicine Pet Ct & Theranostics

Nuclear medicine—a vital component of the rapidly emerging field of molecular imaging—is a medical specialty that uses small amounts of radioactive materials bound to special compounds (radiopharmaceuticals) in combination with imaging instrumentation that examine molecular processes in the body to detect and evaluate disease, such as brain disorders, heart disease and cancer. In addition, radiopharmaceuticals are used for therapy in the treatment of, for example, overactive thyroids and some cancers.

In a nuclear medicine diagnostic procedure, small amounts of radiopharmaceuticals are introduced into the body by injection, swallowing or inhalation. The amount of the radiopharmaceutical that is used is chosen to provide the lowest radiation exposure to a patient while ensuring an accurate medical evaluation. These radiopharmaceuticals are designed to go to specific organs (for example, the liver, the heart, the lung etc). PET (positron emission tomography) scans provide a means to study many types of disease in the body by determining how a disease uses radioactively labelled sugar, thus using the body's own processes to determine disease status.

The amounts of radioactivity administered to the patient are relatively small and are designed to provide the highest quality diagnostic information possible while minimizing the radiation dose to internal organs. The radiation dose to different patients and internal organs varies with procedure. A typical nuclear medicine procedure may impart a radiation dose to the patient comparable to about one to four years of natural background radiation depending on the type of study.1 As with X-rays, the value of diagnostic imaging is great and the risks are negligible compared to the health benefits of having the procedure.