"Benefiting from radiation": At the Division of Nuclear Medicine, open radioactive substances or radioactive drugs are used in the nuclear medicine lab and for diagnostic and therapeutic (local, systemic) purposes in patient care, research and teaching.
The testing of patients to assess the function of various organs and organ systems is important for the earliest possible detection, screening, staging, pretesting, efficacy review and biological endpoint determination of different therapies. The use of a variety of radioactive drugs is unavoidable for imaging in the different function tests and implementation of these therapies.
The tests performed on patients are mostly scintigraphies or PET (PET/CT). Nuclear medicine and radiology tests often complement each other in useful ways and are never in competition.
