Nuclear medicine 2000

✍ Scribed by Otmar Schober

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 558 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0340-6997
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00178300

✦ Synopsis

W-4400 MOnster, Federal RepuNic of Germany What will nuclear medicine be like in 2000 A.D.? Prophktes, phgmai means a narrow way between Delphi, Job and valuable routine clinical work. The aim of our work, the destiny of "nuclear medicine 2000", is clinical medicine, with benefit for the individual patient.

Over 10 years ago Budinger (•980) concluded that the development of single photon instrumentation and its applications had a high likelihood of success in studies of the brain, but not of the thorax or abdomen, in adults. Potential applications of single-photon emission tomography (SPET) in quantitative studies of the brain using acceptable doses should include:

1. Brain blood volume using technetium 99m (99roTe)labelled red blood cells 2. Brain blood perfusion using iodine 123 (123I)-iodoantipyrine or other lipid-soluble radiopharmaceuticals 3. Brain perfusion studies using inhaled xenon 133 and 127 (133Xe and 127Xe) 4. Dopamine receptor site evaluation using t23I-phentylamine radiopharmaceuticals 5. Measurement of physiological conditions in the brain Six years after the appearance of Budinger's report, Wagner (1986) stated that in the foreseeable future nuclear medicine will be based on the use of tracers for positron emission tomography, with the technology diffusing outward from this core.

Clinical demand is not reflected in human studies and clinical publications

Scientific clinical studies do not predict the weight and numbers of the studies done in the clinical routine 10 years later (Fig. 1 a,b). The discrepancy is most remarkable between the scientific interest in diseases of the central nervous system, the gastrointestinal tract and the thyroid, which is particularly relevant in Germany because of the iodine deficit in the food in this region.

The number of papers on radioimmunoassays (RIAs) in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine and the European Journal of Nuclear Medicine is rapidly decreasing (13 vs 1, 1980 vs 1990), and this may reflect scientific interest in nuclear medicine in our journals. Emission tomogra-* Given in part as an invited lecture at the German Nuclear Medicine Congress in T/ibingen 1991.