Is particle physics good for you?

Particles for medicine: cancer therapy and much more . . .

| Is particle research useful? (PDF - link opens in a new window)

Have a look at the PDF and see if you can answer the following questions.

Medical imaging

1. Roughly how many accelerators are being used in medicine around the world?
2. What are radiopharmaceuticals, and how are they made?
3. Why do radiopharmaceuticals have to be made close to where they are used?
4. What does PET stand for?
5. Name three compounds used by the body that can be labelled with radioactive isotopes for PET scanning.
6. Why do these radioactive tracers build up in certain body tissues and not others?
7. What is a positron?
8. What are the decay products when a positron meets an electron?
9. How does detecting these allow the scanner to pinpoint where the positron emission decay happened?
10. Name three other types of medical scanning.

Radiotherapy

1. What type of disease is radiotherapy used for?
2. How does it work?
3. How are X-ray and electron beams for radiotherapy produced?
4. How are neutrons produced for use in radiotherapy?
5. What particles are used in hadrontherapy, and what advantage might they offer over other types of radiotherapy?