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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 29, No. 6. 1966.

Radioisotope scanner

Radioisotope scanner

Improvements of radiation detecting equipment and devices such as the whole-body scanner are rapidly increasing the scope and effectiveness of medical radioisotope work in hospitals and medical laboratories in New Zealand. Radioisotope scanning procedures for clinical diagnosis have been successfully applied to the thyroid, brain, liver, kidney, lung and bone. When the radioisotope has reached its anticipated tissue concentration maximum the radiation detector mounted on the scanning device is mechanically moved across the involved region of the body. As the detector moves, the amount of radioactivity under it is measured and recorded pictorially by the instruments.

The primary requirement of the scanner is its capacity to detect significant differences in the relative concentrations of radioactivity as the detector moves from point to point. In order to determine the position of the radioactive tissues relative to other body tissues, an X-ray picture may be taken of the area of interest, and the scanning image superimposed on the radiograph.