D.L. Bailey
J.L. Humm
A. Todd-Pokropek
A. van Aswegen

2014

Nuclear medicine is the study and utilization of radioactive compounds in medicine to image and treat human disease. It relies on the ‘tracer principle’ first espoused by Georg Karl von Hevesy in the early 1920s. The tracer principle is the study of the fate of compounds in vivo using minute amounts of radioactive tracers which do not elicit any pharmacological response by the body to the tracer.