For treatment, highly targeted radiopharmaceuticals ( Sidebar 2.3) may be used to deposit lethal radiation at tumor sites.
Nuclear medicine imaging ( Sidebar 2.2), in contrast to imaging techniques that mainly show anatomy (e.g., conventional ultrasound, computed tomography, or magnetic resonance imaging ), can provide important quantitative functional information about normal tissues or disease conditions in living subjects. In a nuclear medicine scan, a radiopharmaceutical is administered to the patient, and an imaging instrument that detects radiation is used to show biochemical changes in the body. A radiopharmaceutical is either a radionuclide alone, such as iodine-131 ( Sidebar 2.1) or a radionuclide that is attached to a carrier molecule (a drug, protein, or peptide) or particle, which when introduced into the body by injection, swallowing, or inhalation accumulates in the organ or tissue of interest. Nuclear medicine is a highly multi-disciplinary specialty that develops and uses instrumentation and radiopharmaceuticals to study physiological processes and non-invasively diagnose, stage, 1 and treat diseases. It includes a description of the history and major discoveries in this field, the challenges of conducting nuclear medicine research, and the foreseeable new technologies and opportunities for personalizing health care that could result from aggressive development of the field.
This chapter provides an overview of the field of nuclear medicine for readers who are not familiar with the discipline.
0 kommentar(er)
