How much CT is needed in nuclear medicine

Excerpt

There is a major trend toward reducing the cost of medical care. One of the ways to meet this challenge is to diagnose and treat diseases in their infancy. With the advent of multislice computerized tomography (CT) scans, exquisite anatomical detail is available in shorter time intervals. However, anatomical changes are, by definition, the result of disease process and are thus evident only after the disease has progressed significantly. This has led to a major paradigm shift toward functional and physiologic imaging. We, in nuclear medicine, have the privilege of being able to detect physiological and pathophysiological changes that occur as a result of disease process long before anatomical changes are appreciated. With the emergence of molecular imaging, we are now researching targeted imaging and therapeutic agents that will enable us to visualize these changes at the molecular and cellular levels so as to diagnose diseases in their infancy before they progress or complications arise, resulting in both improved and efficient patient care at reduced cost. …