Nuclear Medicine in Oncology

Abstract

Nuclear Medicine as medical science and clinical practice is known for its use of radiopharmaceuticals to diagnose, treat diseases and evaluate response to treatments. It spans the wide scope of all medical specialties since it is a functional, metabolic and molecular-based investigation of disease processes. The radiopharmaceutical as the basis for data acquisition, processing and analysis of information, is composed of two molecules – one the pharmaceutical is the pharmacologically active component with specific pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics, usually an analogue of another biologic molecule, the other a radionuclide (the source of detecting signal) with specific physicochemical properties. There are two main types of radionuclides, the single photon emitters and the positron emitters. The former enable data acquisition with gamma cameras and the latter are the signal source for Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Radiopharmaceuticals labelled with both types of radionuclides permit diagnosis, staging, restaging, evaluation of disease progression and assessment of response to therapy for many oncological and other types of diseases. In addition to the radionuclides named above for diagnostic purposes, frequently with images, there are other radionuclides, ‘beta minus’ and ‘alpha’ emitters, more and more frequently used with therapeutic intentions, i.e. to treat disease processes. This review paper is a general overview of the capabilities of Nuclear Medicine to help the oncological practice through diagnosis (imaging and quantification) and therapy.

Keywords:

• Medical clinics
• medical imaging and visualisation
• multi-modal imaging and visualisation
• applications of imaging and visualisation

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge technical input for data acquisition and processing by Andreia Rodrigues, Bárbara Freitas, Diana Dantas, Mariana Silva, Sandra Chaves, Sónia Mairos and Vanessa Santos (Nuclear Medicine Technicians), Raquel Reis and Robert Otten (Manufacturer’s Technical Support), João Antunes and Carlos Costa (Information Technology). We also thank John Lee for English editing.