The only other obstacle to the wider use of PET-CT is the difficulty and cost of producing and transporting the radiopharmaceuticals used for PET imaging, which are usually extremely short-lived (for instance, the half life of radioactive Fluorine-18 (18F) used to trace glucose metabolism (using fluorodeoxyglucose, FDG) is two hours only.
Nuclear Radiologist: Average Salary: $180,000. Nuclear radiology is a radiology field that uses radioactive material in imaging, diagnosis and treatment. PET scans, CT scans and gamma imaging are the most commonly used equipment in this field.
Nuclear medicine radiologists, also called nuclear radiologists, are physicians who use radioactive materials, called radiopharmaceuticals, to diagnose and treat disease. They employ such techniques as scintigraphy, which uses radiopharmaceuticals to produce images of the body's organs or to visualize certain diseases.uclear medicine physicists have a master's or doctorate degree in one of the following fields: 1  Physics. 2  Medical Physics. 3  Radiologic Physics. 4  Engineering. 5  Applied Mathematics. 6  Other physical sciences.