Abstract
Nuclear medicine imaging has been at the disposal of urologists for a number of decades. Alongside scintigraphy, positron emission tomography combined with computed tomography (PET/CT) is becoming widely available for clinical use.
A range of radiopharmaceuticals has been reported in recent scientific literature, some of which are now available in the Czech Republic. The significance of this trend is that new and more effective diagnostic modalities have become available for use by practitioners.
The aim of this brief communication is to provide a basic review of modern nuclear medicine techniques for imaging prostate cancer. The properties of radioactive glucose and choline derivatives as well as osteotropic radiopharmaceuticals are described.
Due to the biological heterogeneity of prostate cancer no particular radiopharmaceutical agent is universally superior. The benefits of nuclear medicine imaging techniques can be seen in the detection of metastases in an otherwise cryptogenic localised disease, and in the timely localisation of biochemical recurrences.
In both of these cases early disease detection might change the applicable therapeutic process.