Voiceover: This Cancer update is brought to you by Cancer Treatment Centers of America.
Anne Peterson: Hello I’m Anne Peterson. Cancer Treatment Centers of America made news last year when it was the third hospital in the world and the first in the nation to install an innovative imaging device called a Discovery PET CT 600 Scanner. Dr. Tim McCay a radiologist at the center in Tulsa, Oklahoma is here to tell us about this new equipment. Thank you so much for joining us Dr. McCay. Tell us about this new technology.
Dr. McCay: PET imaging has been around for about ten years. It’s a modality where you inject a radio pharmaceutical and it’s taken up by the tissue to determine metabolic rates. Normal tissue has a standard metabolic rate; cancer grows faster and has an increased metabolic rate.
Anne: So what makes this new technology different?
Dr. McCay: GE changed three things and made it more innovative. The first is sensitivity, for the amount of dose that I inject I can see 100% more information. The second thing is resolution. Previously PET imaging had a resolution of about ten millimeters; with this scanner we can see lesions as small as 3 millimeters. The third thing is when there’s a lesion in the lung or next to the heart or even in the abdomen just with normal physiology it’s going to be moving. They have a new motion match technology which allows us to see the lesion as it moves.
Anne: How is it very very unique?
Dr. McCay: The uniqueness comes in the fact that these are three modalities that had never been able to be changed before. It was always set in stone, but they completely revamped the scanner which allowed them to incorporate the motion match imaging.
Anne: How does this new technology benefit the patient?
Dr. McCay: If a patient has something like a pulmonary knowledgeable that’s less than one centimeter or ten millimeters, they follow it with CT at three, six and twelve months waiting to see if it’s cancer. With this modality we can actually do a PET study and determine if the lesion even as small as three millimeters has a potential for malignancy thus determining whether or not the patient needs to reenter into treatment or simply be watchful waiting.
Anne: Gives us some other examples of how, how it benefits the patient.
Dr. McCay: We had a patient that came to us with an equivocal PET study from her hometown and just felt like something was wrong. We repeated our PET study and saw a three millimeter lesion in her liver. That lesion was treated and now with her last scan we saw no miserable disease.
Anne: Now you are the first in the country to have this type of technology, is this something that you have at all of your Cancer Treatment Centers?
Dr. McCay: It started at our Cancer Treatment Center and the other centers are looking at acquiring this technology but Cancer Treatment Centers of America is committed to fighting, to the fight against cancer every day and using whatever tools at our disposal in order to do that.
Anne: And how long have you had this equipment now?
Dr. McCay: A year and a half.
Anne: This is just incredible and it really does show how Cancer Treatment Centers of America is really making a difference. For more information about the Cancer Treatment Centers of America and their integrative approach to fighting cancer go to cancercenter.com or call 888-348-5492.