Advantages of PET/CT

PET/CT provides physicians with superior information for determining tissue characterizations and classifications, staging of cancers, restaging of cancers, patient prognosis and monitoring the effectiveness of cancer therapies. Advantages include:

Superior lesion localization from near-perfect anatomical/functional registration with fewer motion artifacts.
Better distinction between physiological uptake and pathological uptake.
Consolidation of patient's imaging studies.
Shorter scan time (avg. 30 minutes to complete, vs. 60 minutes with standard PET) by using CT for attenuation correction. This aids in patient comfort and minimizes claustrophobia problems.

RT Planning. Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning is a promising area for PET/CT. The PET/CT, with a continuous 70cm patient bore, will accommodate many therapy treatment pallets. The image data set created by the PET/CT can be sent to nearly every treatment planning system on the market today. The Radiation Therapist can use the data set to define treatment contour maps without having to subject the patient to an additional CT scan.

*Cardiology Applications.* With the recent inclusion of Rubidium PET studies for evaluating Myocardial Perfusion, and with the introduction of the 16 row, isotropic CT, we now have the potential to evaluate cardiac disease with increased information, and with exquisite detail.	"Structural and functional imaging are increasingly understood as complementary rather than competing imaging modalities."
	Paul Shreve, M.D., University of Michigan (August 2000, JNM, 41:8)

Neurological Applications. CMS has approved limited coverage for FDG-PET scans in the differential diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease. In conjunction with PET imaging, CT shows great potential with its ability to quickly scan and demonstrate perfusion characteristics within specific areas of the brain. More research needs to be done in this area, but the potential usefulness of the fused PET scan and CT perfusion scan show great potential for early diagnosis and staging of these disease types.

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