Where did the subtitle for this blog come from? From me, of course. (Or as my Billie Eilish obsessed child would say… duh). In nuclear medicine, we introduce a small amount of radioactive material into the body (by injection or ingestion usually) and as it both distributes in the body and follows the laws of physical decay, there are photons being produced and emitted from the body in the form of energy particles called photons. The nuclear medicine imaging equipment is essentially a camera, which is equipped with a uniform grid shaped structure called a collimator. This part of the camera basically helps eliminate the erratic photons, and only allows those that are traveling in a straight line from origin to the camera surface.
This process of “focusing” the energy from the physical decay of radioactivity, used to make an image of the body parts of interest, is also called collimation. A more generic meaning of ‘collimation’ is to adjust accurately the line of sight of (a telescope). To make the image sharper.
This blog is meant to do that, to share with you my effort at collimation to bring into focus what matters and to eliminate what is not on target.
So it goes.