Practical applications of nuclear medicine in imaging breast cancer.

The rise in incidence, morbidity, and mortality of breast cancer has triggered multiple imaging efforts to detect this malignancy early, stage it accurately, and monitor it with precision in the posttherapeutic course. Among different imaging modalities, nuclear medicine provides an important contribution to the clinical management of breast cancer. This article discusses four practical applications based on the use of radionuclides in the evaluation of breast malignancy, focusing on scintimammography, preoperative tumor localization procedure using radioactive seeds, sentinel nodal scintigraphy, and F-18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography.