Category Nuclear Medicine

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Chapter 22 dealt with the radiation dose received by patients undergoing nuclear medicine procedures. This chapter deals primarily with the exposure of personnel who work in nuclear medicine clinics and research laboratories and who are exposed to radiation in their…

Absorption of energy from ionizing radiation can cause damage to living tissues. This is used to advantage in radionuclide therapy, but it is a limitation for diagnostic applications because it is a potential hazard for the patient. In either case,…

The spatial distribution of a radiotracer in the body is time varying and depends on a number of components such as tracer delivery and extraction from the vasculature, binding to cell surface receptors, diffusion or transport into cells, metabolism, washout…

Image processing refers to a variety of techniques that are used to maximize the information yield from a picture. In nuclear medicine, computer-based image-processing techniques are especially flexible and powerful. In addition to performing basic image manipulations for edge sharpening,…

Virtually all modern positron emission tomography (PET) scanners and an increasing number of single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) systems are integrated with an x-ray computed tomography (CT) scanner. These hybrid imaging systems are capable of acquiring PET or SPECT…

The second major method for tomographic imaging in nuclear medicine is positron emission tomography (PET). This mode can be used only with positron-emitting radionuclides (see Chapter 3 , Section G). PET detectors detect the “back-to-back” annihilation photons that are produced…

As discussed in Chapter 16 , a rotating gamma camera can be used to acquire data for computed tomographic (CT) images. This approach to tomography, which is employed with radionuclides that emit single γ rays or multiple γ rays with…

A basic problem in conventional radionuclide imaging is that the images obtained are two-dimensional (2-D) projections of three-dimensional (3-D) source distributions. Images of structures at one depth in the patient thus are obscured by superimposed images of overlying and underlying…

Image quality refers to the faithfulness with which an image represents the imaged object. The quality of nuclear medicine images is limited by several factors. Some of these factors, relating to performance limitations of the gamma camera, already have been…