Nuclear Engineering: Medicine Applications

Nuclear Engineering focuses on solving several of the world's most important grand-challenge problems. The last three years have seen much happen for Nuclear Engineering.

Nuclear Engineering is all about devising how to use radioactive materials in manufacturing, agriculture, medicine, power generation, and many other ways, perhaps the most important being in medicine, where over 1/3 of all procedures in the United States use nuclear techniques.

In nuclear medicine, small amounts of radioactive materials called radiopharmaceuticals are used for diagnosis and therapy. Nuclear processes are used to provide images inside the human body, to detect and measure biochemical processes, and to provide therapy. A major event in 2000 was the FDA approval of the first Monte-Carlo code for use by doctors to design radiation therapy for cancer. Based on nuclear reactor design methods, this new tool now allows doctors to take detailed magnetic resonance imaging data (another nuclear technique) and predict with great accuracy how to deposit precisely enough radiation to kill cancer tumours without damaging surrounding tissue. Previous crude calculation methods often forced doctors to cause damage to substantial amounts of healthy tissue, or to miss completely killing tumours.

The use of radiopharmaceuticals is expected to increase rapidly as new diagnostic methods are developed. Nuclear medicine is being considered for use in infection imaging, neurology and other fields. At this time, most therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals involve the treatment of cancer. On-going research is being conducted to expand nuclear medicines to treat other diseases as well.

Gravatom is a leading provider of solutions and equipment for radiopharmaceutical processing in UK. They specify, design, manufacture, install and validate process equipment and integrated containment technologies.

They offer a disciplined approach to the application of current good practice to comply with GMP, radiopharmaceutical, safety, health and environmental regulations.

Their expertise derives from more than 30 years’ experience of containment and handling solutions.