From the June 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


The large bore is also patient-friendly, which is more important than ever in this new health care environment that places the patient at the center of care. “These people are sick — for the most part they either have cancer or are suffering from some form of dementia, so a more pleasant scanning environment with a very, very wide bore versus a conventional narrow bore PET/CT is very useful,” says Winkler.

It’s all about quantification now
“The major trend that we have seen over the last five years, and is going to be here for more years [to come], is that we are moving from typical, staging oncology examinations for PET/CT to treatment monitoring,” says Xavier Tarrade, global PET/CT product marketing manager at GE Healthcare.
The biggest advancement in PET/CT in the past couple of years is quantification. Whether it’s used for oncology, cardiology or neurology, it has now become the standard. “We are entering the phase where it’s not about just the image quality — it’s about getting quantitative information that is specific to each individual patient,” says Kirill Shalyaev, general manager of advanced molecular imaging at Philips Healthcare. “It’s a stepping stone toward personalized medicine.”

With quantification, physicians can now measure the standard uptake value (SUV) to determine if treatment is working. It’s particularly useful for oncology because if the SUV value goes down after the patient undergoes treatment, then the treatment is working. But if the value stays the same or increases, then the radiation oncologist or chemotherapist can switch to a more effective therapy.

For cardiology, quantification can determine which vessels are the most occluded so the physician knows which one to perform angioplasty on. For neurology, if the frontal or temporal lobes are not picking up the biomarker, then the patient may be developing Alzheimer’s disease.

“At this point you can’t treat Alzheimer’s disease but the SUV values in the brain show the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease or the amount of amyloid plaque, so the patient can be given medication to improve the quality of their life with the time they have remaining,” says Siemens’ Brait.

Quantification is also gaining a lot of interest in the SPECT and SPECT/CT fields as well. At last year’s Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging annual meeting, GE introduced its Discovery NM/CT 670 Pro SPECT/CT system, which features a set of new qualitative tools.

GE’s Q.Suite technology includes two analysis and reporting applications to simplify organ definition and activity calculations. The Q.Metrix application measures and reports SUV values and the Q.AC application is an image reconstruction algorithm that improves the accuracy of SPECT attenuation correction so that quantitative measurements can be obtained at very low doses. Siemens also brought quantification to SPECT/CT with the introduction of its Symbia Intevo SPECT/CT system in 2013. It features a technology called xSPECT that uses the CT as a frame of reference rather than conventional SPECT/CT imaging, which uses SPECT.

June 2015 Magazine

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