Introduction.

Nuclear medicine is gaining greater and greater importance as a diagnostic tool. In this book, which finds its origin in a Training Course held in Munich in October 2010 (third MADEIRA Training Course on Imaging in Nuclear Medicine), we try to give an overview of the recent and future trends in the fields that contribute to the process of imaging. After a description of the imaging techniques (Part I), the issue of tomographic image reconstruction and processing is presented in detail in Part II. Part III deals with the outcomes of the European research project MADEIRA. Finally, Chap. 12 summarizes useful “rules of the thumb” that can be directly put in use for producing and keeping good quality images