← All decks
Radiology
Essential Science of Nuclear Medicine
Built from Fundamentals of Diagnostic Radiology
What’s inside
8 sections · 124 slides
Overview
- The science behind nuclear medicine
Radiation Physics
Ionizing and nonionizing radiation, photon interactions, and dose units
- The electromagnetic spectrum in imaging
- Where x-rays and gamma rays come from
- Annihilation radiation in PET
- Ionizing radiation: photons and particles
- The beta particle
- Beta particles deposit energy over a short range
- Bremsstrahlung (braking radiation)
- Radionuclides used in nuclear medicine
- Radionuclides used in nuclear medicine (continued)
- How photons interact with matter
- Photon interactions with matter
- Photoelectric versus Compton
- Which interaction dominates
- Radiation dose quantities build on one another
- Activity, exposure, and absorbed dose
- Equivalent and effective dose
- Tissue weighting factors by organ
- Conventional and SI radiologic units and conversions
- Radiation units and what they measure
Radiation Safety
Occupational and public limits, ALARA, monitoring, pregnancy, and breast-feeding
- Occupational radiation exposure
- 50 mSv
- Cancer risk from radiation
- Contamination control in the workplace
- Population dose from natural and medical sources
- Physical, biologic, and effective half-lives
- Typical diagnostic doses
- Critical organ and target organ
- Imaging the pregnant patient
- Breast-feeding after radiopharmaceuticals
- Breast-feeding cessation after radiopharmaceuticals
- Breast-feeding cessation after radiopharmaceuticals (continued)
- Time, distance, and shielding
- The NRC and ALARA
- NRC regulations in three parts
- Radiation survey instruments
- Cradle-to-grave records
- Personnel dosimetry badges
- Daily and weekly contamination monitoring
Radiopharmaceuticals
How tracers localize, how they are produced, and the Mo-99/Tc-99m generator
- What a radiopharmaceutical is
- Tracers and their natural analogs
- How radiopharmaceuticals localize (biodistribution)
- How radiopharmaceuticals localize (biodistribution, continued)
- What makes an ideal radiotracer
- Cyclotron-produced radionuclides
- Generator-produced radionuclides
- Mo-99 and its daughter Tc-99m
- Mo-99/Tc-99m decay scheme
- How the Moly generator is eluted
- The daily generator cycle
- Wet and dry Mo-99/Tc-99m generators
- Mo-99/Tc-99m generator elution curves
- Moly breakthrough
- Aluminum breakthrough
- How Tc-99m kits are made
- Radiochemical purity and TLC
- Medical events and dose errors
- Wrong drug, route, patient, or treatment
- Reporting a medical event
Imaging Systems and Detectors
Scintillation cameras, collimation, PET coincidence, reconstruction, and attenuation
- Nuclear images are functional, not anatomic
- Reading a nuclear image
- Scintillation detector basics
- Components of a scintillation detector
- Locating the interaction point
- Components of a gamma camera detector
- Correction matrices
- Crystal thickness trade-off
- Scintillator materials
- Why collimation is needed
- Collimator types
- Pinhole collimator
- Pinhole collimation
- Parallel-hole collimator
- Parallel-hole collimation
- Septal geometry and collimator choice
- Converging and diverging collimators
- Electronic collimation (coincidence detection)
- The principle of coincidence detection
- Random coincidences and detector segmentation
- A block detector for PET imaging
- Time-of-flight PET
- Energy analysis and the photopeak
- Tc-99m photospectra (with and without scatter)
- Energy windows
- Planar imaging
- From planar to SPECT and PET
- SPECT and PET acquisition
- Filtered backprojection
- Iterative reconstruction
- Reconstruction parameters and filters
- What attenuation is
- Half-value layer
- Attenuation in large patients
- Attenuation correction
- Limitations of CT attenuation correction
- Scatter correction and moving organs
Gamma Camera QC
Intrinsic floods, resolution and linearity, collimator checks, and center of rotation
- Why imaging systems need QC
- Planar and SPECT camera quality-control procedures
- Intrinsic flood image
- Intrinsic flood images
- Data loss from correction circuits
- Resolution and linearity checks
- Spatial resolution and linearity of a gamma camera
- Collimator QC
- Center of rotation (COR)
- Center of rotation
- Pixel-size calibration
PET Scanner QC
Daily checks, timing and gain, normalization, and phantoms
- PET QC differs from gamma camera QC
- PET daily check
- Timing alignment and PMT gain
- Normalization and calibration
- Phantoms and acceptance testing
Nonimaging Detectors
Dose calibrator, sodium iodide well-counter, and thyroid uptake probe
- Dose calibrator
- Dose calibrator
- Using the dose calibrator
- Dose calibrator quality control
- Sodium iodide well-counter
- Sodium iodide well-counter
- Thyroid uptake probe
- Thyroid uptake probe
- Key ideas to remember
- Suggested readings
- Suggested readings
- Brant and Helms' Fundamentals of Diagnostic Radiology