A Quarter Century of Progress
The 25th annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine in June 1978 marked an era of tremendous growth for this dynamic multidisciplinary specialty. In the silver anniversary commemorative issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, DeLand1 enumerated those nuclear medical modalities that are currently important and available to the clinician. They include procedures that represent all aspects of the field—imaging, physiological studies, in vitro procedures, and therapy. The instrumentation, radiopharmaceuticals, and techniques developed during the past quarter century have resulted in procedures such as skeletal, hepatic, and brain imaging for the diagnosis of cancer; pulmonary ventilation and perfusion scintigraphy for the evaluation of pulmonary embolism; and thyroid function testing, imaging, and hormone radioassay, indispensable in the management of thyroid disease.
Noninvasive Diagnostic Methods
The momentum of the past has been sustained in more recent years as well. The marriage of the digital computer to