Prostate Cancer: PSMA PET and Functional Imaging

So my name is Vince Brown.

I'm one of the nuclear medicine, abdominal imaging faculty at UCSF.

Just out of curiosity, how many of you know what nuclear medicine is? So I'll tell you, when I was a radiology resident, this is what I came to my mind.

I was going to be working in this, right? It's going to be me, you know, dating me as The Simpsons.

But in reality, what is nuclear medicine? It's our ability to put radioactive material onto drugs and then wash that drug around the body.

We can use it in various applications, anything from oncology, just the physiologic, to cardiac.

We do it every day, day in and day out.

How does it work? Well, we get this compound, it goes in and produces radiation, then we put them underneath special machines, and those special machines allow us to see the images, or we get numbers that gives us information about a part of the body.

Now I'm going to focus in on a specific type.

There's lots of different nuclear medicine.

There's planar imaging, which just sits underneath a plate and makes an image.

There's SPECT imaging.

I'm going to talk about PET imaging.

It's a subtype of imaging that we are tracking specific type of radiation.

It stands for positron emission tomography.

It's dictated by the type of drug we inject into the patient.

There's lots and lots of different choices, but we choose and tailor our application based on what we're trying to go after.