Radiopharmaceuticals

Radiopharmaceuticals

Nuclear medicine provides important diagnostic and functional information on specific organs in addition to radiation therapy for certain disease states. Diagnostic scans are used in many specialities, including oncology, cardiol-ogy, surgery, neurology and renal medicine. Departments routinely perform investigations such as cardiac scans to evaluate the extent of heart disease, bone scans to detect metastatic disease and cell labelling to help evaluate whether infectious or non-infectious inflammatory conditions are present. As radiation detectors continue to improve and new ligands are developed, the number of clinical applications continues to expand. Lymph scanning is a case in point where technological advances have now enabled surgeons to use the scan to assist in staging of malignant melanomas and breast cancer.

Radiopharmacy is a specialised area of CIVAS with several unique char-acteristics. Radiopharmaceuticals have extremely short shelf-lives compared to other pharmaceuticals. Shelf-lives are frequently measured in the range of seconds, hours and days rather than weeks, months or years, and this requires that doses are prepared on the day of use using radionuclides obtained freshly from a technetium generator kept in the radiopharmacy.