Moonho Lee Memorial Lecture: Nuclear Medicine for All the World -from Molecular Imaging to Molecular Medicine-

specialty of nuclear medicine is living and well. The number of scientific presentations at the annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine (SNM) in the United States has increased linearly over the past half century. The excitement and progress resulting from the application of the tra-cer principle in living human beings continues. Oncology is still the major topic in nuclear medicine, followed by neurosciences and cardiology. Among the major applications were those contributing prognosis, treatment decisions, and documenting the responses to treatment. There has been a continual growth in positron emission tomogra-phy (PET) applications, while the number of single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) presentations has been relatively constant at a high level. One of the major trends in nuclear medicine today is the growth of SPECT/ CT. 18 F remains the dominant radionuclide, with 710 presentations at the SNM meeting: 545 being FDG (fluorodcoxy-glucose); 118 presentations involved C-11. Technetium was the topic in 301 papers, with 131 I, the old reliable, being there for 95 papers. Another major trend is the increase of imaging of animals with a dedicated animal device. One hundred studies were based on a dedicated PET imaging device; about 40 were based on a SPECT imaging system. There were 5 PET/CT papers for small animals, but 11 presentations involved SPECT/CT. There has been a plateau over the last 10 yr in the use of SPECT, which in the past has raised the possibility that nuclear medicine in the future will be based primarily on PET tracers. Today we can see that single photon tracers are alive and well. New instruments include high-sensitivity, multi-pinhole SPECT with submillimeter resolution. It is possible to get virtually limitless resolution with single photon trac-ers, whereas with a PET tracer being a plus tracer, there is a finite range of the positrons in tissue before annihilation occurs and 511 kev photons are emitted. SPECT is now becoming added to tissue sampling and autoradiography by pharmaceutical companies and academic pharmaceutical laboratories. A new instrument consists of 4 banks of 9 pinholes; the spatial resolution is 1 mm. A left ventricular aneurysm was seen in the beating heart of a mouse. Some new devices have the ability to perform both PET/CT and SPECT/CT in the same hybrid system for small animals. The industry has now incorporated all 3 modalities into a single instrument. Molecular imaging is developing a knowledge-based health care system. …