Münster 2017 – scientific programme
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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne
HK 56: Hauptvorträge IV
HK 56.2: Invited Talk
Friday, March 31, 2017, 11:40–12:20, F 1
Radionuclides for medical applications — •Ulli Köster — Institut Laue-Langevin, Grenoble, France
Ionizing radiation plays an important role in many medical applications. Not only the specialties radiology, radiotherapy and nuclear medicine rely on ionizing radiation, but also radioguided surgery, certain dermatology procedures, research and development of new pharmaceuticals, etc. Last but not least about half of all medical devices are sterilized by ionizing radiation before use.
The dominating radionuclides in diagnostic nuclear medicine are 99mTc for SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) and 18F for PET (positron emission tomography). These work horses are complemented by other diagnostic radionuclides with shorter or longer half-lives or different chemical properties to cover a wide range of applications. Therapeutic applications of radiopharmaceuticals were so far restricted to relatively rare diseases (e.g. thyroid cancer), but new targeted radionuclide therapies for different types of cancer and other diseases are now coming into clinical practice. The future holds great promise for theranostics, a type of personalized medicine where a targeted radionuclide therapy is individually optimized based on imaging with a companion diagnostic radiopharmaceutical. Such applications are ideally performed with so-called matched pairs of diagnostic and therapeutic radionuclides of the same chemical element.
The presentation will discuss medical applications of radionuclides and the respective production methods. A particular emphasis is made on synergies with nuclear physics research facilities.