Among the medical disciplines, the field of nuclear medicine has made one of the most remarkable progress in the past decade. This progress is based on the rapid development of relating fields especially those of nuclear instrumentation and of radioisotope production. In this report survey on the instrumentation in nuclear medicine was attempted.
Instrumentation is devided into two categories, one for the in vitro measurement and the other for the
in vivo measurement. For the in vitro measurement of medical samples the simplified well counter and the programmed well counter were recently introduced. These are to meet the requisit of the expanding diagnostic use of thyroid function test (T-3) in many hospitals and quick handling of medical samples to assess the circulating blood volume in emergency cases. Advantage and importance of large volume detector in nuclear medicine were emphasized. Instrumentation for the radioisotope chromatography, liquid scintillation spectrometry and neutron activation analysis in the in vitro measurement of nuclear medicine was also discussed.
The
in vivo measurement, which provids us with unique information of the disease, has showed remarkable progress by the introduction of unique medical instrumentations. Among them the scintillation scanner, now one of the most important instrumentation in nuclear medicine as a routine diagnostic means, and the γ camera showed sophistication in their design. Varieties of external γ counter, whole body counter are discussed in this chapter, included here also the most recent device of author's catheter type semiconductor radiation detector for the
in vivo measurement of cardiac output and upper GI tract malignancy.
Because of the world famous electronics industry in Japan, most nuclear instrumentation is now supplied through domestic industries. Fourteen figures are selected which indicates the tendency of the Japanese products.
In summary, instrumentation in nuclear medicine becomes the one for single purpose rather than multiple-purpose machine used at the cradle stage of this field. Rapid and remarkable progress having been achived in the last decade is almost sure to come in the following years, because, for example, the short life nuclide is only recently applied to the still limited field of nuclear medicine.
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