What is a radioactive tracer?

They are radioactive substances that are introduced into the body so that certain diseases such as tumors are visible.

They are substances that the body uses in its metabolism. For example, iodine is used in the thyroid gland and is therefore used to find tumors in the thyroid gland. If they inject you with some radioactive iodine, it goes right into the gland and with the x-rays you can then see it.

There is also a new type of tracker, the FAPI tracker.

To find metastasis, FDG18 has often been introduced, which is fluorine 18 (radioactive isotope) bound to glucose.

Many types of cancer consume huge amounts of glucose, and that’s why they exhaust the patient over time.

But if a tumor is in the brain, it becomes difficult, because the brain also consumes a lot of glucose and the tumor remains camouflaged.

That’s why they use new tracers such as oxygen, nitrogen and gallium isotopes (and many others).

And the image frighteningly shows how the metastases are distributed, I don’t think any imaging technique has been able to do that so accurately before.