Oxygen-18

Encyclopedia : O : OX : OXY : Oxygen-18

Oxygen-18 is a natural, stable isotope of oxygen and one of the environmental isotopes. It makes up about 0.2 % of all naturally-occurring oxygen on Earth.

O-18 is an important precursor for the production of fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) used in positron emission tomography (PET). Generally, in the radiopharmaceutical industry, enriched water (H₂¹⁸O) is bombarded with hydrogen ions in either a cyclotron or linear accelerator creating fluorine-18. This is then synthesized into FDG and injected into a patient.

In Arctic and Antarctic ice cores, it also is used to determine the temperature of the different years by melting the respective layers corresponding to particular years.

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