The Nuclear Medicine Room

Welcome to the Nuclear Medicine room. The large piece of equipment is called a Gamma Camera but it's a bit different from the cameras that you're probably familiar with! To read how this camera works, please click on the machine in the picture.

Nuclear Medicine is a method of imaging the physiological processes of the body using radioactive tracers. Put more simply it is a way of looking at how the body is working. It is quite a different process from x-rays, CT, MRI and Ultrasound all of which are mostly looking at the anatomy of the body.

To look at the function of the body, Nuclear Medicine uses gamma rays. These are very similar to x-rays used in the x-ray department. The major difference is that the gamma rays are emitted by pharmaceuticals injected into the bloodstream rather than being produced by machines outside the body. The gamma rays are detected by this gamma camera that builds up a picture of the area of the body under investigation. In order to keep the radiation doses to patients as low as possible, the activity injected is kept very low. This means that it may take quite a long time (perhaps 30 minutes) to build up a picture.