Nuclear medicine is returning to its origin by studying more and more metabolic signals using new positron or single-photon-emitting radiopharmaceuticals. The history of nuclear medicine over the past 50 years highlights the strong link between investments in chemistry and the development of radionuclides and radiolabeled compounds. In fact, one can trace the major advances in nuclear medicine directly to research in chemistry. These advances have had a major impact on the practice of health care. According to the Society of Nuclear Medicine, 20 million nuclear medicine procedures using radiopharmaceuticals and imaging instruments are carried out in hospitals in the United States alone each year to diagnose disease and to deliver targeted treatments. These techniques have also been adopted by basic and clinical scientists in different fields (infection, immunology, gastroenterology, cardiology, oncology, neurology, psychiatry, and others) for diagnosis as well as for scientific tools.

 

Many groups of research are now developing radiopharmaceuticals as biomarkers for new drug targets to facilitate the entry of their new drugs into the practice of health care and to objectively examine drug efficacy at a particular target relative to clinical outcome. This has created a demand for new radiopharmaceuticals and a corresponding need for scientists who are trained to develop them.

 

The traditional lack of techniques suitable for in vivo imaging has induced a great interest in molecular imaging for preclinical research. Nevertheless, its use spreads slowly due to the difficulties to justify the high cost of the current dedicated preclinical scanners. An alternative for lowering the costs is to repurpose old clinical gamma-cameras to be used for preclinical imaging. In this paper P. Aguiar et al. have assessed the performance of a portable device that is working coupled to a single-head clinical gamma-camera and have presented their preliminary experience in several small animal applications. Their findings, based on phantom experiments and animal studies, provided an image quality, in terms of contrast-noise trade-off, comparable to dedicated preclinical pinhole-based scanners. They suggest that their device can offer an opportunity for recycling the widespread availability of clinical gamma-cameras innuclear medicine departments to be used in small animal SPECT imaging contributing to spreading of the use of preclinical imaging within institutions on tight budgets.

 

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