Landmark developments in nuclear medicine physics and engineering over the last 70 years

By the time of the first published issue of Physics in Medicine and Biology in 1956, the fundamentals of nuclear medicine were well established. The nature of radioactivity and its nuclear origins had been discovered, the tracer principle had been invented, radiation detectors had been developed and methods for generating diagnostic images and exploiting the therapeutic eTects of radionuclides were already in their infancy. Despite this, a practitioner in the 1950s would find it almost impossible to imagine the technology used in nuclear medicine today, the quality of the images produced, or the breadth of clinical and research applications it has enabled. Over the last 7 decades nuclear medicine has been transformed from a medical curiosity into a mainstream component of the modern healthcare system globally and an important tool in clinical research and therapeutic trials. This article highlights the landmark discoveries and technological advances since 1956 that have significantly shaped the field and got us to where we are today.