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Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | November 20, 2009
Clinical benefits
Though undoubtedly a technological achievement, what benefit would this bring to patients in the radiologist's office?
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Schaeffter believes the combined MR-PET would have a number of clinical gains, from improved workflow to more precise heart-function tests and better guidance for cancer treatments.
For one, it could improve sensitivity by correcting for the above-mentioned motion blur. "By correcting for motion, you would get a sharper tumor," says Schaeffter. This could allow you to "detect smaller lesions in an earlier stage," he says.
Plus, PET and MRI can be combined for novel therapies. For instance, Schaeffter says scientists are working on PET agents that show regions in the body with hypoxia, or low oxygen. Tumors with low oxygen, he says, need higher doses of radiation therapy to fix. While the PET scan is being done, the MR scanner can also measure blood flow and determine if the tumor is highly vascularized, as these sorts of lesions can treated with separate drugs.
Together, these two modalities could also help with certain tests of heart strength and function. The MRI modality, Schaeffter says, is the most accurate one to assess heart muscle contractions, which can then be conducted at the same time as PET perfusion studies - to monitor how well the heart muscle is perfused. Although the two tests could be performed sequentially, by doing them at once, not only would doctors reduce workload, they could measure the related functions at the same time under the same stress conditions. This could give a more accurate assessment, Schaeffter suggests.
The future
Still, the device is some ways away from any real clinical applications, as the team has only just finished the proof-of-concept stage, showing the device does, in principle, work. Right now, the team is aiming to have a preclinical version ready for the next milestone, its first image, which they expect to have by the middle of next year.
"In the end, that's what counts," says Klink. "You have to show images."
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