Total-Body PET Creates New Patient Care Opportunities

It will also reduce the time taken to scan the whole body by at least a factor of 10, leading to scan times that could be less than one minute.

By covering the entire body at once, sensitivity is increased by a factor of ~40 for total-body imaging, or a factor of ~4-5 for imaging a single organ such as the brain or heart. Significant improvements in timing resolution could lead to even further sensitivity gains. According to the researchers, the combination with total-body PET could produce overall sensitivity gains of more than two orders of magnitude, when compared to existing state-of-the-art systems. The study was published in the January 2018 issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine (JNM).

“One total-body PET scanner could take on the work load of three-to-four conventional PET scanners, and being able to receive imaging biomarkers from more distant distribution centers will minimize the need for costly in-house biomarker production,” said Terry Jones, DSc, clinical professor of diagnostic radiology at UCD. “As the impact of high-sensitivity, total-body PET scanning becomes apparent, this will provide a major stimulus to physicists, chemists, and engineers to develop lower-cost detectors for total-body surveillance.”

PET is a nuclear medicine imaging technique that produces a 3D image of functional processes in the body. The system detects pairs of gamma rays emitted indirectly by a positron-emitting radionuclide tracer. Tracer concentrations within the body are then constructed in 3D by computer analysis. In modern PET-CT scanners, 3D imaging is often accomplished with the aid of a CT X-ray scan performed on the patient during the same session, in the same machine.

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