Foreword

The fourth edition of Nuclear Medicine: The Requisites con­tinues to follow the philosophy and format of the first three editions. The basic science chapters are designed to pre­sent important principles of physics, instrumentation, and nuclear pharmacy in the context of how they help shape clinical practice. The clinical chapters continue to follow a logical progression from basic principles of tracer distribu­tion and localization to practical clinical applications. The authors believe that understanding tracer mechanisms is fundamental to nuclear medicine practice and that knowl­edge of how radiopharmaceuticals localize temporally and spatially in normal and diseased tissues is the best deduc­tive tool available for analyzing images and is superior to simply memorizing representative illustrations.

In the time between the publication of the third and fourth editions of this title, the field of nuclear medicine has continued its remarkable development. Single­photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) has morphed in­creasingly into SPECT/computed tomography (CT), and an increasing number of scanner designs have been devel­oped, primarily for specialized cardiac imaging. Positron emission tomography (PET) has become much more wide­spread, with larger institutions acquiring their own cyclo­trons. It can now be said with confidence that PET/CT has proved to be a substantial advancement, especially in body imaging. PET/magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is still in its infancy, but enough data are in hand to predict that this integrated method will also become important, although the scale of applications is still unknown. The other revolution in PET is the clinical availability of new radiopharmaceuti­cals, including agents aimed at Alzheimer disease diagnosis, and literally dozens more tracers are in the pipeline.

Adding new SPECT, PET, PET/CT, and PET/MRI ap­plications to the nuclear medicine armamentarium has in­jected new, even unprecedented, vitality into the special­ty. Readers of Nuclear Medicine: The Requisites will feel this vitality almost palpably as they work their way through the book. Among other challenges, the integrated methods of PET/CT and PET/MRI require higher levels of knowl­edge of anatomic cross­sectional imaging than ever before, as well as more knowledge of the respective technologies. Some of this is beyond the scope of the current book but can be found elsewhere in the Requisites series.

The Requisites in Radiology titles have become old friends to generations of radiologists. The original intent of the series was to provide the resident or fellow with a text that might be reasonably read within several days at the beginning of each subspecialty rotation and perhaps reread several times during subsequent rotations or during board preparation. The series is not intended to be ex­haustive but rather to provide the basic conceptual, factu­al, and interpretive material required for clinical practice. After more than 20 years of experience with the series, it is now clear that the books are also sought out by practicing imaging specialists for the efficiency of their presentation format and the quality of their material. With more people reaching the point of requiring re­certification, the Requi­sites books should again prove helpful.

Each book in the Requisites series is written by nation­ally recognized authorities in their respective subspecialty areas. Each author is challenged to present material in the context of today’s practice of radiology rather than grafting information about new imaging modalities onto old, out­of­date material. It is our hope in adopting this strategy that readers will find the Requisites titles to be a very efficient way of accessing the most important material.

The first three editions of Nuclear Medicine: The Requisites were well received in the radiology and nuclear medicine community. Dr. Ziessman and his colleagues have again done a terrific job in putting together a new and updated edition, and we expect that this edition will be deemed to be as outstanding as its predecessors. We hope that Nuclear Medicine: The Requisites will serve residents in radiology as a concise and useful introduction to the subject and will also serve as a very manageable text for review by fellows and practicing nuclear medicine specialists and radiologists.

James H. Thrall, MDRadiologist-in-Chief

Massachusetts General HospitalJuan M. Taveras Professor of Radiology

Harvard Medical SchoolBoston, Massachusetts

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