NUCLEAR MEDICINE

Nuclear Medicine

Nuclear Medicine

Dave Barry a famous writer once explained nuclear medicine as two words that do not go jointly at all. Nevertheless, despite its ominous-sounding name, nuclear medicine is a valuable technology that is safer than the average X-ray, maintains Jan Winn, assistant professor of radiologic technology, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. It allows health care experts unique glimpses inside a patient's body that they can not get through any other type of test. Defined simply, nuclear medicine is a diagnostic tool, just as are X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans. The dissimilarity indicates that with nuclear medicine people are able to look at the physiology of the patient - how the parts of body and other tissues are functioning as opposed to just seeing what the anatomy looks like, which is mainly what you get with ultrasound, X-rays, MRIs, etc.

To get this knowledge, a substance known as a radioactive "tracer" is attached to a drug with an affinity for the area to be studied - the heart, brain, or liver, for instance. After the drug and tracer are inserted into the human body, the diagnostic apparatus follows the tracer through the body, giving vivid images of how that specific part is functioning. Tests are fairly short, lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and a half.

By means of radiopharmaceuticals sounds bad, and the radioactive signs on hospital doors are frightening to observe, but in reality patients undergoing [such] tests receive less radiation than they would from many X-ray procedures, Winn points out. Additionally, these tracers exist short-term, most are excreted from the human within one day, and the patients know-how no side effects. Nuclear medicine began in the 1950s and 1960s as a sub-specialty of radiography. Nowadays, the field is extremely sophisticated, with study under way ...