Applications of Radioisotopes in Medicine

* Radiopharmaceuticals Chemistry Section, Radiochemistry and Isotope Group, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, Mumbai-400085, Email: [email protected] uclear medicine’ is the medical specialty, which utilizes the nuclear properties of radioactive substances in diagnosis, therapy and research to evaluate metabolic, physiologic and pathologic conditions of human body. As an integral part of patient care, nuclear medicine is presently used in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of many serious ailments. Now-a-days, nuclear medicine offers procedures that are immensely helpful to a broad spectrum of medical sciences ranging from oncology to cardiology to psychiatry. Today physicians are equipped with a wide variety of nuclear imaging procedures and these uniquely provide information about the function of virtually every major organ/tissue of the human body. Nuclear medicine imaging procedures often identify abnormalities at the very early stage of the progression of the disease, long before it could be detected by other alternative diagnostic modalities and this allows the disease to be treated early in its course. However, the actual strength of nuclear medicine lies in its ability to monitor both anatomical and physiological functions in-vivo, which is not possible by the other contemporary imaging modalities, such as, computed tomography (CT) scanning, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound imaging1. Though, these imaging modalities are able to delineate anatomical features with a much superior resolution, they provide only limited information on the physiological functions1. Although the field of nuclear medicine is dominated by the diagnostic procedures, it also has valuable therapeutic applications, which include treatment of hyperthyroidism, rheumatoid arthritis, Hodgkin’s disease and a wide range of cancers, like cancers in breast, ovary, prostate, liver, colon, lung and endocrine glands. Nuclear medicine has also been extensively used to treat various heart ailments, leukemia and for providing pain relief to the patients suffering from metastatic bone cancer. Nuclear medicine has always been perhaps the most exciting area of investigation in medicine2. Today, it is considered as one of the important diagnostic and therapeutic specialty in the armamentarium of medical sciences in spite of its modest beginning less than a century ago.