Chapter 19
Seeing Good Biophysics in the Medical Field
In This Chapter
Glowing in the doctor’s office
Petting cats and non-animal CATs
Looking for non-organic PETs
Biophysics has many applications in many different fields, such as in medicine and in two other subfields of physics: medical physics and health physics. Medical physics is the application of physics in medicine and includes three primary branches: radiation therapy physics, nuclear medicine, and diagnostic imaging physics. Health physics deals with health and safety with radiation, and protection from radiation.
This chapter focuses on how radioactivity and radionuclides are used in medicine. I focus on three applications: the first is radioactivity and nuclear medicine, the second is the use of computerized axial tomography (CAT) scanners (also known as computed tomography (CT) scanners), which allows doctors to image the human body using X-rays, and the third application I discuss is positron emission tomography (PET) scanners, which is a technique for imaging processes within the body.
This chapter doesn’t address ultrasound imaging, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). ...
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