The Scarborough Hospital (TSH) offers a Nuclear Medicine department at each campus, each with highly-trained staff who use state-of-the-art gamma cameras to perform thousands of exams each year. Nuclear Medicine uses radioactive materials to help diagnose and treat a wide variety of diseases and disorders, which is unique because it provides information about both structure and function to get an overall picture of the concerns a patient may have.
Radiopharmaceuticals are detected by our gamma cameras creating pictures of body parts being scanned. These radioactive materials can be injected, inhaled or taken orally.
TSH also uses a new technology that fuses a Nuclear Medicine single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scan – an imaging technique using gamma rays – with a CT scan. The new equipment enables staff to better localize and define lesions within organs.
Although most Nuclear Medicine procedures are performed at both TSH campuses, some are location-specific. Services include:
Birchmount campus
- Lung Quantification
- Gastric emptying study with liquid or solid meal
- Brain scan/flow for brain death
- Hepatobiliary scan with drug intervention
- Treatment for thyroid cancer
- Parathyroid imaging with SPECT
- Thyroid scan with Tc99m and Uptake for low Iodine 123 thyroid
- Total body using Iodine 131
- Testicular scan
General campus
- Thyroid scan and Uptake with Iodine 123 for evaluation of hyperthyroidism
- Parathyroid imaging
Birchmount and General campus
- Bone mineral density (Bone Densitometry)
- Bone scans, whole body or specific site with SPECT
- Myocardial Perfusion imaging with Cardiolite, walking stress or persantine to determine blood supply reaching the heart
- Resting wall motion study Multi-Gated Acquisition Scan (MUGA) to evaluate heart function
- Lung ventilation and perfusion scan
- Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) imaging to assess fluid flow dynamics
- Brain perfusion imaging (brain SPECT)
- Gastrointestinal bleed study
- Hepatobiliary scan to evaluate the function of the gallbladder
- Liver/Spleen scan
- Meckel’s Diverticulum, to determine a malformation of the gastrointestinal tract
- Red blood cell (RBC) Liver with SPECT for diagnosis of a liver hemangioma
- Salivary scan
- Treatment for Grave’s disease
- Gallium scan, whole body or specific site with SPECT
- Renal scan, with or without drug intervention
- Sentinel node breast imaging
