WHAT HAS PARTICLE PHYSICS RESEARCH DONE FOR HEALTH?
Read this introductory article about nuclear medicine then answer the questions below. You will need to dig a bit deeper to answer some questions fully…

When you’re done, your teacher may ask you to use what you have learned to prepare a short presentation.

Particles for medicine: cancer therapy and much more . . .
DOWNLOAD: IS PARTICLE RESEARCH USEFUL.PDF

Particles for medicine: cancer therapy and much more . . .

Medical imaging

• Roughly how many accelerators are being used in medicine around the world?
• What are radiopharmaceuticals, and how are they made?
• Why do radiopharmaceuticals have to be made close to where they are used?
• What does PET stand for?
• Name three compounds used by the body that can be labelled with radioactive isotopes for PET scanning.
• Why do these radioactive tracers build up in certain body tissues and not others?
• What is a positron?
• What are the decay products when a positron meets an electron?
• How does detecting these allow the scanner to pinpoint where the positron emission decay happened?
• Name three other types of medical scanning.

Radiotherapy

• What type of disease is radiotherapy used for?
• How does it work?
• How are X-ray and electron beams for radiotherapy produced?
• How are neutrons produced for use in radiotherapy?
• What particles are used in hadrontherapy, and what advantage might they offer over other types of radiotherapy?