BACKGROUND This paper is the first in a series of invited perspectives by four pioneers of Nuclear Medicine imaging and physics. A medical physicist and a Nuclear Medicine clinical specialist each take a backward look and a forward look at the contributions of Medical Physics to Nuclear Medicine. DISCUSSION Contributions of Medical Physics are presented from the early discovery of radioactivi...

When we embarked on our careers a decade ago, there was renewed interest and numerous opportunities for a career in Nuclear Medicine. We were attracted to the variety of procedures in the field of Nuclear Medicine: PET had just come to the clinic, presenting a great deal of promise and a revival of job opportunities. However, recent changes in the medical care paradigm and reimbursement have di...

Introduction: One of the major problems in the development of nuclear medicine images is the presence of noise. The noise level in nuclear medicine images is usually reduced by the analysis of imaging data in a Fourier transform environment. The main drawback of this environment belongs to low signal to noise ratio in high frequencies because removing noise frequencies may remove data and times...

Nuclear medicine imaging procedures play an important role in the assessment of inflammatory diseases. With the advent of 3-dimensional anatomic imaging, there has been a tendency to replace traditional planar scintigraphy by CT or MRI. Furthermore, scintigraphic techniques may have to be combined with other imaging modalities to achieve high sensitivity and specificity, and some may require ti...