Treatment And Diagnosis Require Nuclear Medicine
A reference in the area of medical research in the country, the Nuclear Medicine Center of the Institute of Radiology (Inrad) of the Hospital das Clínicas of the Faculty of Medicine of USP was a pioneer in the use of radioisotopes in Latin America. Created in 1959, in the beginning its work was dedicated to research, with few clinical applications. Giovanni Guido Cerri, chairman of the boards of Inrad and of innovation at USP, says that the place has its own cyclotron. “It is one of the few centers in the world that has high-quality equipment for the production of radioisotopes, used at Hospital das Clínicas and also elsewhere. He develops new radioisotopes, mainly for the field of oncology, with a series of advanced researches in oncology and also neurology.”
The center also has one of the only two Pet Resonance equipment in the country for diagnosis and a Pet CT, ultra-modern devices for detecting diseases. “ It is essential equipment for diagnosing cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. Nuclear medicine is increasingly consolidating itself in an area that will contribute to diagnosis and treatment and which today is called theranostic, because it involves diagnosis and treatment simultaneously.”
Museum
The Nuclear Medicine Center has a museum to preserve the memory of what was done in a pioneering and rudimentary way. It is a record of the past to tell its trajectory to the present day. Carlos Alberto Buchpiguel, radiologist at Incor – Instituto do Coração of the Hospital das Clínicas at USP, points out that today the diagnoses of diseases are based much more on a construction of biological, pathological origin, than exactly clinical syndromic. “More and more people are using nuclear medicine to identify aspects that in the past were only possible to be recorded through autopsy, through the analysis of the tissue of that organ, and today in a non-invasive way you can detect these characteristics through the image and use them not just for imaging as well as for treatment. We believe that, in the future, with artificial intelligence and a series of other devices, we will be able to identify characteristics of molecular changes in cells in a totally non-invasive way, that is, without having to do a biopsy or remove a certain part of a particular organ and characterize aspects that promote the appearance of different diseases and, with that, open perspectives for more efficient treatments with less toxicity and better quality of life”.
Nuclear medicine owes nothing to the work carried out in other countries, what is lacking are resources for research and making this a specialty distributed more equally to different socioeconomic strata of the population. The Unified Health System (SUS) already makes use of technology in some situations, but the economic deficiency and the outdated reference table affect the service. São Paulo concentrates a large part of the cutting-edge Nuclear Medicine that is practiced in the country today. “ USP was the first structured training center approved by the MEC in the area of Nuclear Medicine, which comprises at least three years of basic training, with the fourth year being optional. “