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The performance of a gamma camera system is defined by the sharpness and detail of the images it produces, the efficiency with which it detects incident radiation, its ability to measure the energy of the incident γ rays (to minimize…
Radionuclide imaging is the most important application of radioactivity in nuclear medicine. Radionuclide imaging laboratories are found in almost every hospital, performing hundreds and even thousands of imaging procedures per month in larger institutions. In this chapter, we discuss briefly…
Radiation counting systems are used for a variety of purposes in nuclear medicine. In vitro (from Latin, meaning “in glass”) counting systems are employed to measure radioactivity in tissue, blood, and urine samples; for radioimmunoassay and competitive protein binding assay…
Nuclear medicine studies are performed with a variety of types of radiation measurement instruments, depending on the kind of radiation source that is being measured and the type of information sought. For example, some instruments are designed for in vitro…
Most of the radiation measurement systems used in nuclear medicine use pulse-height analysis ( Chapter 8 , Section C) to sort out the different radiation energies striking the detector. This is called pulse-height or energy spectrometry. It is used to…
All measurements are subject to measurement error. This includes physical measurements, such as radiation counting measurements used in nuclear medicine procedures, as well as in biologic and clinical studies, such as evaluation of the effectiveness of an imaging technique. In…
Most of the radiation detectors used in nuclear medicine are operated in a “pulse mode”; that is, they generate pulses of electrical charge or current that are counted to determine the number of radiation events detected. In addition, by analyzing…
When radiations from a radioactive material pass through matter, they interact with atoms and molecules and transfer energy to them. The transfer of energy has two effects: ionization and excitation. Ionization occurs when the energy transferred is sufficient to cause…
The two most important general types of radiation emitted during radioactive decay are charged particles , such as α particles and β particles, and electromagnetic radiation (photons), such as γ rays and x rays. These radiations transfer their energy to…
Most of the naturally occurring radionuclides are very long-lived (e.g., 40 K, T 1/2 ~ 10 9 years), represent very heavy elements (e.g., uranium and radium) that are unimportant in metabolic or physiologic processes, or both. Some of the first…