How does nuclear medicine work, and what are its main uses?
TILKEMEIER: The difference with nuclear medicine compared with most other imaging techniques is that it allows us to see the actual function of an organ or a cell or a body part, as opposed to looking at its structure, as you might with a CT scan. When we give a patient a radioactive substance, it is directed toward answering a specific question. So I’m a nuclear cardiologist; if you come to me with chest pain and I want to see blood flow to your heart muscle, we use a specific radioactive pharmaceutical that is supposed to go to the heart muscle, and if it doesn’t go there, we know there’s a problem with the blood flow that will allow us to diagnose coronary artery disease. Nuclear medicine can also be applied to lungs, livers, bones, brains, thyroids – it’s a generalized field that we use to image organ function throughout the body, using small amounts of radioactivity that are tagged to go to certain body organs. PBN: How is it tagged? TILKEMEIER: We couple it to a chemical that is
