Radionuclides in medicine
Radionuclides have been used routinely in medicine for more than 60 years. Nuclear medicine uses radiation to provide information about the functioning of a person's specific organs to diagnose or treat disease. The radionuclides used in medicine have half-lives ranging from a few minutes to several days to minimise the patient's radiation dose.
Students will:
- use MS Excel to construct simple graphs of decay of three unknown medical radionuclides
- use their graph to calculate the half-life of the radionuclides
- determine the identity and use of each radionuclide using the background information provided.