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Welcome to
this lecture on the basics
of nuclear medicine imaging.
My name is Dale Bailey.
I'm a physicist.
I work at Royal North Shore Hospital
and the University of Sydney
in Sydney, Australia.
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In this lecture, I
want to address some
of the basics of the physics
instrumentation and methodology
involved in nuclear medicine.
Nuclear medicine was originally
developed in the days
prior to cross sectional
imaging, with modalities
such as X-ray CT and MR.
Using radioactive traces
was the only way to image
the soft tissues the
body, such as the brain,
thyroid, lungs, liver, heart,
kidneys, spleen, and other organs.
Today we recognize
that nuclear medicine
has a role as a functional imaging
modality, whereas we regard
the cross sectional
imaging with CT or MR
as primarily a structural,
or anatomical imaging tool.
Nuclear medicine functional
imaging has a role in the diagnosis
of a disease; locating
unknown disease,
such as infection or primary
tumour; staging of disease, that is,
the extent to which the disease
has spread through the body;
monitoring response
to treatment, to see
whether the drugs or
the radiation therapy
is being efficacious or not.
We also use nuclear
medicine in therapy,
with the idea of the
tumour-seeking magic bullet,
where we deliver
radiation to a targeted
tumor or other abnormality.
And finally, nuclear medicine
has a large role in research,
as a way of non-destructive testing
of animal models and humans,
where we can study the time
course of a trace's uptake
and look at the kinetics
of that with time.
