What is Nuclear Medicine?
It is a specialty of radiology in which physicians diagnose and/or treat diseases with the use of safe radioactive material. These tests are especially valuable because they show how an organ or system works or functions. One particular benefit of a nuclear medicine test is its sensitivity to abnormalities very early on in the progression of the disease, before the medical problem would be apparent with other types of testing procedures.

Nuclear medicine uses radionuclides (an isotope of artificial or natural origin that exhibits radioactivity. Certain imaging procedures, including PET scanning, use radionuclides to provide real-time visuals of biochemical processes. One device, a nuclear imaging machine, employs a scintillation camera, which can rotate around the body to pick up radiation emitted by an injected substance or contrast material (e.g., radioactive iodine, which localizes in the thyroid, or radioactive thallium, which localizes in the heart). Through computerization, a digitized image of a particular organ is produced.

What is contrast material?
Also referred to as contrast agent or contrast medium. Any internally administered substance that has a different opacity from soft tissue on radiography or computed tomography. Materials used include barium, used to make opaque parts of the gastrointestinal tract; water-soluble iodinated compounds, used to make opaque blood vessels or the genitourinary tract; may refer to air occurring naturally or introduced into the body; also, paramagnetic substances used in MRI.

What is Interventional Radiology?
It is a specialty of radiology in which radiologists diagnose and/or treat diseases without surgery, by guiding tiny tubes through your body's arteries and organs. This allows the radiologists to place medications directly at the organ site, open blocked blood vessels, drain an obstructed kidney, obtain biopsies, and perform many other procedures - using x-rays and other radiologic equipment to guide them.

Interventional radiologists specialize in the use of fluoroscopy, CT, and ultrasound to guide passage through the skin by needle puncture, including introduction of wires and catheters for performing procedures such as biopsies, draining fluids, inserting catheters, or dilating or stenting narrowed ducts or vessels.

What’s the difference between
interventional radiology and diagnostic radiology?
Interventional radiology seeks to make changes in the body by using electromagnetic or particulate radiation to treat disease. Diagnostic radiology seeks to see how the body is functioning to discover if something is wrong.

What is Radiation Therapy?
Treatment with high-energy rays to kill cancer cells. Radiation therapy that uses a machine located outside the body to aim high-energy rays at the cancer is called external radiation. When radioactive material is placed inside the body in thin plastic tubes, the treatment is called implant radiation.

What is Neuroradiology?
The branch of medicine that uses radiant energy (x-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, etc.) to diagnose disorders or diseases of the central nervous system.

What is a PET scan?
Positron emission tomography, also called PET or a PET scan, is a diagnostic examination that involves the development of biologic images based on the detection of subatomic particles. These particles are emitted from a radioactive substance given to the patient. The subsequent views of the human body are used to evaluate function.

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