Abstract
The relatively high cost of nuclear-medicine equipment has produced a situation in which a service is provided centrally, patients being transferred from smaller or outlying hospitals. The disadvantages of inter-hospital transfer of the ill patient, the inability to perform investigations on those too ill to travel, and the man-hours involved escorting patients, prompted this study to assess both the technical feasibility and the possible clinical advantages of providing a transportable nuclear-medicine service. This paper is concerned solely with technical aspects of the project, concentrating on its initial design and the results obtained in the first six months. At the planning stage in 1977 a choice had to be made between transporting a mobile gamma camera which could be off-loaded from a small van and driven into the hospital, or a static gamma camera permanently positioned in a large van, similar to the mass X-ray service or mobile whole-body counter (Boddy, 1967). The former approach was adopted for the following reasons: the quality of images from a mobile gamma camera was as good as that of images from a static camera, the transporting vehicle would be much cheaper, the driver would not require an HGV licence and finally the patients would not have to be brought outside the hospital.
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