How does nuclear medicine imaging differ from other imaging approaches?
There are two areas in cancer imaging. You have anatomical imaging, which constitutes the larger part of cancer care, and you have functional imaging. Nuclear medicine uses radioactive agents to look for specific functional changes that help us discriminate “bad” tissues from “good” tissues. For example, we use a radioactive sugar called fluorine-18 labeled glucose. Typically, a tumor – which is often growing at a faster rate – uses sugar at a faster rate. We use that indicator to identify the tumor. In the case of lymphoma, we use a radioactive tracer called gallium. Radioactive gallium tends to accumulate in active lymphoma. As the tumor activity diminishes, we also see less gallium in the lesion. In essence, PET imaging detects the heightened metabolic activity typical of cancer cells.
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