How does nuclear medicine work?
The way that nuclear medicine works is that we have a patient, of course, with a specific need that requires a nuclear medicine technique. Then we have the radiopharmaceutical that is administered to that patient based upon what the problem is and we can go into detail later on about that. And then of course, we have the imaging system that is required to basically take an image of the distribution, of the bio-distribution, of this radioactive material. So, for example, suppose a patient has metastatic prostate cancer with lesions in the bone. We want to know how extensive the metastatic prostate cancer is in the bone. And, we have a radio tracer which is specifically designed for going to sites of bone metastases where the bone is being repaired or is reactive to the cancer. So the patient is administered with this radiopharmaceutical intravenously, and then after an appropriate amount of wait of the radiotracer to be distributed to the body. Then they position the patient in the chamber system, and as I mentioned, we have these gamma rays coming off from that radioactive activity that is within the patient. And that gamma ray is detected by these imaging systems. Then we have computer systems which gather up these gamma rays and form an image of the distribution of that tracer, radiotracer, in the body. That image is presented on a computer monitor, which we can manipulate, in fact these are not always static images, and we have a lot of dynamic images that we deal with in nuclear medicine. So we can manipulate them, we can look at them with different projections, different contrasts, colours, and basically in combination with the clinical data that we have on that patient, plus other imaging that we have available; for example, anatomical imaging, such as CT or MRI or other imaging mentalities, to interpret what you are looking at. And we put it all together to generate a report that basically discusses what we see and what does it mean from what we see.
