REFINEMENTS WITH TARGETRY TO OVERCOME ACCELERATOR ENERGY CONSTRAINTS

Nuclear medicine is the specialty of medical imaging which utilizes a variety of radionuclides incorporated into specific compounds for diag nostic imaging and therapeutic applications. During recent years resea rch in this discipline has concentrated on the decay characteristics o f particular radionuclides as well as upon the design of unique radiol abeled tracers necessary to achieve the time-dependent molecular image . Many of the radionuclides under consideration are accelerator produc ed. The cyclotron at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), o ne of the earliest accelerators dedicated to serve a medical research program, has undergone an extensive reconditioning effort to meet the challenges of enhanced operational performance and improved radiochemi cal production necessitated by the Center's clinical research effort. Special emphasis has been applied to the development of target systems in order to achieve pilot production of sufficient quantities of requ ired radionuclides to undertake clinical evaluation of promising trace rs.