a lecture is about the nuclear medicine imaging

1. Nuclear Medicine
By
Dr. Amal Al-Yasiri

2. What is the nuclear medicine
• Nuclear medicine is a medical specialty that is used
to diagnose and treat diseases in a safe and painless
way
• Nuclear medicine refers to medicine (a
pharmaceutical) that is attached to a small quantity
of radioactive material ( a radioisotope). This
combination is called a radiopharmaceutical or
radiotracers
• There are two fields of nuclear medicine ( imaging
and therapy)
• In this presentation, I will be talking about imaging

3. Nuclear Imaging
• Nuclear imaging uses small amounts of radiotracers
that are typically injected into the bloodstream,
inhaled or swallowed.
• The radiotracer travels through the area being
examined and gives off energy in the form of gamma
rays which are detected by a special camera and a
computer to create images of the inside of your
body.
• Nuclear imaging provides unique information that
often cannot be obtained using other imaging
procedures (such as X-ray, CT-Scan) and offers the
potential to identify disease in its earliest stages.

4. Why is it important?
• Enables early discovery of changes in tissues since
changes in function often occur before changes in
anatomy.
Nuclear imaging gives us molecular image
X-ray and CT-Scanner gives us anatomical imaging
• Can help find and characterize diseases in every
organ system including the heart, brain, skeleton,
thyroid and kidneys— and many types of cancer.

5. Why is it important?
• How is nuclear imaging different from X-ray,
CT scan, US, or MRI
Modality Anatomy Physiology Metabolism Molecular
CT/X-Ray
US
MRI
NM(PET, SPECT)

6. How does it work?

7. Nuclear medicine modalities
• Positron emission tomography (PET)

8. Nuclear medicine modalities
• Single Photon Emission Computed tomography (SPECT)

9. SPECT vs. PET, Which is Best?
• Both have their pros and cons, more research is needed
to compare SPECT and PET,
• Pros and Cons
• The main positives of SPECT are that it’s widely used and
much cheaper than PET.
• SPECT radio tracers also have half-lives of up to six hours,
allowing a lot of imaging time, while PET tracers only have
a half-life of about few minutes. SPECT radio tracers are
also much cheaper and more abundant than PET tracers.
• However, SPECT has issues, including long scan times and
low-resolution images prone to artifacts and attenuation
whereas PET has higher spatial resolution and short scan
times.