As anyone in internal medicine knows, however, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, and while it may not look revolutionary, this machine may change the way cancer is treated.

Cancer Treatment Centers of America’s Southwest campus, at 81st Street and Hwy 169, recently became the first U.S. hospital to install GE Healthcare’s Discovery PET/CT 600, a distinction CTCA radiologist Dr. Timothy McCay said was based on mutual trust.

“This is a new technology, and being willing to put money on the line for a new technology [the cost of which was not disclosed] is not easy, especially in this economic climate,” McCay said. “But we trusted that GE had the technology and had done their homework enough to perfect the technology.

“On GE’s side, they wanted to put it in a place that would really utilize it and would really make it sing, and a cancer hospital is a perfect place for that.”

Their Powers Combined

CT, or Computed Tomography, uses multiple x-ray images to create a detailed, three-dimensional model of the patient’s anatomy.

Positron Emission Tomography, PET, uses a radioactive glucose analog called fluorine-FDG to find areas of abnormal metabolic activity in the body. Cancerous cells are stuck in replication, which will use more glucose, and therefore store more fluorine-FDG than healthy tissue.

By combining these technologies, doctors gain more accurate data.

“When these technologies were developed, they would do a PET study, then the patient would walk across the hall to get the CT study, and they would try to match them up,” McCay said. “The problem, though, was that the patient wouldn’t lay the same for both studies. This allows us to get the patient in the exact same position, guaranteed, allowing us to accurately locate the tumor and localize the treatment.

Less is More

The joining of PET and CT technologies isn’t what makes the Discovery PET/CT 600 exceptional, however.

“PET and CT scanners have been married for a while,” said Jim Mitchell, GM of GE Healthcare’s PET/CT Division. “We have made substantial improvements to the machine’s sensitivity and how it handles motion.”

In medicine, increased accuracy can literally be a matter of life and death.

“If motion gets in the way of detecting a lesion, that is more time for the cancer to do harm to the body,” Mitchell said. Which is why GE came up with MotionMatch, a camera mounted on the end of the camera that tracks a sensor on the patient’s abdomen to correct for breathing and other motion.

The result, McCay said, is unmatched accuracy.

“We had GE here earlier today, and I showed them a lesion that was four millimeters on the very top of the liver,” he said. “That is absolutely the hardest area to image because it moves with the diaphragm.

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