It is a way to gather medical information that may otherwise be unavailable, require surgery, or necessitate more expensive diagnostic tests. As an integral part of patient care, nuclear medicine is used in the diagnosis, management, treatment, and prevention of serious disease. Nuclear medicine imaging procedures often identify abnormalities very early in the progression of a disease -long before some medical problems are apparent with other diagnostic tests. This early detection allows a disease to be treated early in its course when there may be a more successful prognosis. Nuclear medicine uses very small amounts of radioactive materials or radiopharmaceuticals to diagnose and and treat disease.
Radiopharmaceuticals are substances that are attracted to specific organs, bones, or tissues.
These cameras work in conjunction with computers used to form images that provide data and information about the area of body being imaged. The amount of radiation from a nuclear medicine procedure is comparable to that received during a diagnostic x-ray. Today, nuclear medicine offers procedures that are helpful to a broad span of medical specialties, from pediatrics to cardiology to psychiatry. There are nearly one hundred different nuclear medicine imaging procedures available and not a major organ system which is not imaged by nuclear medicine.