Nuclear Engineering: Medicine Applications

Nuclear Engineering focuses on solving several of thesurrounding tissue. Previous crude calculation methods
world's most important grand-challenge problems. Theoften forced doctors to cause damage to substantial
last three years have seen much happen for Nuclearamounts of healthy tissue, or to miss completely killing
Engineering.tumours.
Nuclear Engineering is all about devising how to useThe use of radiopharmaceuticals is expected to
radioactive materials in manufacturing, agriculture,increase rapidly as new diagnostic methods are
medicine, power generation, and many other ways,developed. Nuclear medicine is being considered for
perhaps the most important being in medicine, whereuse in infection imaging, neurology and other fields. At
over 1/3 of all procedures in the United States usethis time, most therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals involve
nuclear techniques.the treatment of cancer. On-going research is being
 In nuclear medicine, small amounts of radioactiveconducted to expand nuclear medicines to treat other
materials called radiopharmaceuticals are used fordiseases as well.
diagnosis and therapy. Nuclear processes are used toGravatom is a leading provider of solutions and
provide images inside the human body, to detect andequipment for radiopharmaceutical processing in UK.
measure biochemical processes, and to provideThey specify, design, manufacture, install and validate
therapy. A major event in 2000 was the FDAprocess equipment and integrated containment
approval of the first Monte-Carlo code for use bytechnologies.
doctors to design radiation therapy for cancer. BasedThey offer a disciplined approach to the application of
on nuclear reactor design methods, this new tool nowcurrent good practice to comply with GMP,
allows doctors to take detailed magnetic resonanceradiopharmaceutical, safety, health and environmental
imaging data (another nuclear technique) and predictregulations.
with great accuracy how to deposit precisely enoughTheir expertise derives from more than 30 years’
radiation to kill cancer tumours without damagingexperience of containment and handling solutions.