Positron emission tomography. Fundamentals and clinical applications

Positron emission tomography (PET) is currently the most comprehensive diagnostic tool in oncology imaging, with a growing incidence in cardiology and neurology. Obtaining the image with PET is a highly complex technique that is widely used today and whose results have enormous diagnostic significance, providing data that illustrate specific changes in processes that take place at the molecular level. PET, like most of the formidable advances observed in new forms of diagnosis and treatment (Digital Radiology, Computed Tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Laser, Ultrasound, Radiotherapy), comes from knowledge and techniques provided fundamentally by physics. In the last half century, in addition to physics, biology, medicine, biochemistry, chemistry, engineering, computing and different techniques of digitalization and image processing have contributed central contributions to modern highly complex techniques employed in the health field. For this reason, the PET modality exceeds the limits of any unidisciplinary training. Thus, a new field of study known today as Medical Physics is incorporated. The new concept of Diagnostic Imaging, arising from the integration of traditional modalities, is indicating that we are facing a new, eminently multidisciplinary phenomenon. In this new environment, each one of its actors, without losing focus on their basic training, must be aware of the new challenges that remain to be solved. Regarding PET, the incentive is to delve into the central objective of Nuclear Medicine, which is the early detection of metabolic alterations. In this new scenario of the use of PET technology, the essential need for the understanding of two central professionals, the medical specialist and the medical physicist, has been generated.