Fig. 3

Schematic illustration of a typical radio-guided surgical procedure. Stages of the procedure include: (1) a radio-labelled tracer administered to the patient before the operation; (2) the radiopharmaceutical mainly absorbed by the tumour; (3) after the tumour mass removal, the surgeon scans the lesion with a radiation detection probe and searches for targeted tumour residues in real time. The lower images show the effect of the proposed procedure with γ-emitter tracers, and with β-emitting tracers