ABSTRACT
Nuclear medicine, the use of nuclear-based techniques in medicine for research, diagnosis, and therapy, is probably the most important aspect of the nuclear enterprise, next to the use of fission reactors for the generation of electricity. In the early years, the history of nuclear medicine closely followed the discovery and production of radioactive isotopes dating back to 1934 when artificial radioactivity was first discovered by Irene Curie and her husband Frederic Joliot. As in any interdisciplinary area in science and engineering, nuclear medicine encompasses a varied composition of technical expertise to fulfill the requirements for medical diagnoses and therapies. The production of radiopharmaceuticals requires stringent quality control practices, which includes determining the purity of the radionuclide. Ideally, radiopharmaceuticals used in imaging should be single-photon-emitting or positron-emitting radionuclides. Technical advances in PET and hybrid imaging systems have been described by Lee and advances in SPECT imaging have been elaborated upon by Madsen.
