Guest Editorial: Veterinary Nuclear Medicine

Veterinary Nuclear Medicine has undergone evolutionary changes for the past 50 years. Although a few studies were reported before the 1970s, for practical purposes, the use of nuclear medicine techniques in veterinary medicine began in the 1970s in the United States and Europe. Drs Donald Thrall and Edward Gillette, Colorado State University, published one of the first nuclear medicine imaging articles in Veterinary Radiology in 1971 proving that lung scintigraphy using a rectilinear scanner could detect occlusive pulmonary vascular lesions in the dog. Professor Gottlieb Ueltschi, University of Bern, in 1975 showed the potential of bone scintigraphy to evaluate equine lameness by reporting the results from 19 horses in the Schweizer Archiv für Tierheilkunde (Swiss Archive for Veterinary Medicine). That same year, there were presentations at the 20th World Veterinary Congress in Greece on the use of scintigraphy to evaluate the thyroid in goitrous dogs and a presentation on the detection of brain tumors in dogs. During the 1980s, there was significant expansion of the use of nuclear medicine in most Veterinary Teaching Hospitals in the United States and Europe. The types of nuclear studies performed varied widely from gastric emptying studies to gated cardiac and first-pass shunt analysis to quantitative hepatobiliary scintigraphy. The modality flourished for several reasons. At that time, there was lack of competition from other modalities (Ultrasound, Computed Tomography, a...
Source: Seminars in Nuclear Medicine - Category: Radiology Authors: Source Type: research