Radioisotopes in nuclear medicine

Full text: A number of advances in diverse fields of science and technology and the fruitful synchronization of many a new development to address the issues related to health care in terms of prognosis and diagnosis resulted in the availability of host of modern diagnostic tools in medicine. Nuclear medicine, a unique discipline in medicine is one such development, which during the last four decades has seen exponential growth. The unique contribution of this specialty is the ability to examine the dynamic state of every organ of the body with the help of radioactive tracers. This tracer application in nuclear medicine to monitor the biological molecules that participate in the dynamic state of body constituents has led to a whole new approach to biology and medicine. No other technique has the same level of sensitivity and specificity as obtained in radiotracer technique in the study of in-situ chemistry of body organs. As modem medicine becomes oriented towards molecules rather than organs, nuclear medicine will be in the forefront and will become an integral part of a curative process for regular and routine application. Advances in nuclear medicine will proceed along two principal lines: (i) the development of improved sensitive detectors of radiation, powerful and interpretable data processing, image analysis and display techniques, and (ii) the production of exotic and new but useful radiopharmaceuticals. All these aspects are dealt with in detail in this talk