Communicating across the boundaries

Nuclear medicine is intrinsically a molecular methodology. The molecolar essence of nuclear imaging is implicitly encoded in its fundamental principles. These provide the necessary scientific background for employing very small objects, such as radiolabeled single molecules (radiopharmaceuticals), to obtain diagnostic information. The molecular picture demands the use of a well-defined nomenclature system for a precise description of the cheminature of the radiopharmaceutical. Since labeled molecules are the real diagnostic probes in nuclear medicine, it is higly desirable for us to adopt a consistent approach for describing the exact chemical structure of the radiopharmaceutical.