A Look Inside the Heart: Nuclear Medicine in Argentina
<p>Here’s a look into a waiting room at the Nuclear Diagnostics Centre Foundation in Buenos Aires, Argentina — the centre receives around 80 patients a day.</p>
<p>Read on to find out why they’re here.</p>
<p>Photo: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
<p>The Centre offers nuclear medicine services, including medical imaging.</p>
<p>We met some of the patients, who told us their story. Lola Finkel is one of them.</p>
<p>Finkel fainted last year. “I was walking down the street, with a friend, when I lost sense of everything,” she said. “All I knew when I woke up was that I had fallen in the middle of the street, and that my chest hurt.”</p>
<p>Photo: Martin Klingenböck / IAEA</p>
<p>Neither ultrasound nor effort tests could reveal the full cause of Fiskel’s fainting or the extent of the potential damage in her heart — then she was referred to something called single photon emission computed tomography, or a SPECT scan.</p>
<p>SPECT is a nuclear medicine imaging technique that allows doctors to see inside a patient’s body. In this case, they could get a 3D image of Fiskel’s heart.</p>
<p>Photo: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
<p>Thanks to that 3D image, Fiskel’s doctor identified the cause of her fall: ischemia, or low blood flow. She is now treated with cardiovascular pharmaceuticals and monitored with nuclear medicine.</p>
<p>Photo: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
<p>Without nuclear medicine and without this diagnosis, Fiskel’s heart condition could have worsened, and treatment would have been more complicated, including the need for open-heart surgery.</p>
<p>Photo: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
<p>This is why nuclear medicine is so important.</p>
<p>“Nuclear medicine is a technology that allows you to look at the heart inside the patient’s chest, without opening it,” said Roberto Agüero, Fiskel’s doctor (left). “It helps us to know the precise degree of damage in the heart, something we cannot do otherwise.”</p>
<p>Photo: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
<p>Another technique that allows doctors to see inside the patient’s body is PET, or positron emission tomography.</p>
<p>To look inside a patient’s heart using PET, an entire orchestra of experts, substances and equipment is working behind the scenes.</p>
<p>Let’s have a look at how that works.</p>
<p>Photo: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
<p>To begin with, medical staff produce radiopharmaceuticals and introduce them into the patient’s body.</p>
<p>Some types are only effective for a short period of time, so they need to be produced close to where they are used.</p>
<p>The Nuclear Diagnostics Centre Foundation produces radioisotopes for PET using its own cyclotron — a type of particle accelerator — which is also the only cyclotron in Buenos Aires. It looks like this.</p>
<p>Photo: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
<p>Physicists and chemists on one side produce radiopharmaceuticals in the safe, highly-secured cyclotron.</p>
<p>Photo: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
<p>The isotopes then flow underground, through a special drain, into another safe room.</p>
<p>Photo: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
<p>Here, a radiopharmacist prepares the material for injection behind protected metal doors, introduces it into a flask, and places it in a robust, shielded metallic cylinder. All these measures are used to avoid exposing medical staff to radiation on a daily basis.</p>
<p>Photo: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
<p>In an adjacent room, a nurse takes the syringe out of that metallic cylinder, injects the radioactive material into the patient and makes him or her wait.</p>
<p>Photo: Martin Klingenböck / IAEA</p>
<p>After one hour, the patient goes into the examination room and lies down for PET.</p>
<p>Photo: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
<p>The machine scans the patient’s body, detecting the radioactivity the drugs are emitting.</p>
<p>Photo: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
<p>And producing 3D images of the patient’s organs for the doctor to interpret.</p>
<p>Photo: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
<p> The IAEA helps centres like this one provide high-quality nuclear medicine services to its patients through support equipment, expertise and training.</p>
<p>Captions by: Laura Gil / IAEA</p>
