A review of nuclear microscopy and applications in medicine

Nuclear Microscopy, the extraction of analytical information from microscopic regions of a sample using a scanning focused high energy ion beam, has been increasing in popularity recently, despite its technical complexity. The three ion beam related techniques Particle Induced X-ray Emission (PIXE), Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry (RBS) and Scanning Transmission Ion Microscopy (STIM) can be carried out simultaneously at sub-micron spatial resolutions, and provide structural and quantitative elemental analysis down to the parts per million levels of analytical sensitivity. These techniques are extremely useful for measuring any imbalances in trace elements, including metal ions, in localised regions of biological tissue, and as such can provide unique information on many diseases. In this paper we briefly describe the nuclear microscope and its related ion beam techniques, and briefly review recent work carried out using the nuclear microscope into the degenerative diseases Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and atherosclerosis.