This issue of the JNMT has 2 articles that I would like to highlight for you. The first is the continuing education article by J. Anthony Seibert, PhD. Dr. Siebert is a professor of radiology at the University of California, Davis, in Sacramento and is world-renown in the area of diagnostic radiology physics. He is one of the coauthors of The Essential Physics of Medical Imaging, which many radiology residents use in preparation for their radiology board examinations. We are very lucky that he agreed to write a 4-part series covering x-ray production, image formation, image quality, and CT. This information should be quite useful to technologists that will be taking the CT examination from the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists in the next year.
A second article of note in this issue is a special contribution by Geraldine Merle Philotheou that describes her experience in implementing a distance-learning program for nuclear medicine technologists in Sub-Saharan Africa. I encourage each of you to read this article. I think there is much we can learn from this article, not only about her experience with this teaching program but also about the difficulties associated with practicing nuclear medicine in the developing world. Those of us in the United States and Europe find it inconceivable a practice could be unable to obtain 99mTc generators because mail services were no longer available. Without radiopharmaceuticals, technologists students in these countries have had to either drop out of their program or go to another country to complete their training. We complain about a shortage of technologists. They cope with unstable governments and lack of basic services that we take for granted will always be available.
Ms Philotheou’s article made me think about a trip I made to a medical physics meeting in Cuba a couple of years ago. Many nuclear medicine departments in Cuba are still using rectilinear scanners to image patients. The subject of my talk at this meeting was the state-of-the-art in nuclear medicine equipment. I admit that I wondered how interested the attendees would be in equipment that they didn’t have and, because of the U.S. embargo, couldn’t get. I was quite surprised to have a colleague tell me that one Cuban attendee had said that my talk was “golden” and that the content was exactly what they wanted to hear. What I learned at the meeting was that incredible work can be done by intelligent and inventive people, even if their resources are limited.
I think that, as practitioners of nuclear medicine, we must think about how we can encourage and facilitate the distribution of knowledge not only among ourselves but also to people in developing countries. What may seem like common knowledge to us may be new information to them. We should also remember that the JNMT is read all over the world and is the only journal directed at nuclear medicine technology. As we discuss the need to obtain and use the latest in technology, it would be good to think about how we can also help improve the resources available to technologists the world over.