As pioneers in biomedical imaging and neuroscience, the researchers at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, have long appreciated the physiologic connections shared between the brain and the body. Now it is possible to image connected physiologic systems over the entire body at the same time. A new class of positron emission tomography (PET) scanners is making it possible to image multiple organs and organ systems - from the brain to the heart to the gut - simultaneously with high precision, revealing scientific and clinical insights. Mass General Brigham (MGB) is building a clinical translation and research program around this new technology.
Acquisition of this novel PET technology has been made possible through two grants awarded to Ciprian Catana, MD, PhD, Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Molecular Imaging Core at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center, by the National Institutes of Health and Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. Dr. Catana has long been an innovator in PET technologies that support scientific understanding of the brain and the body. Demand for PET imaging at MGH has been steadily increasing. "These latest awards will increase our molecular imaging capabilities to help meet the growing demand for PET among the more than 200 researchers performing studies at MGH, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology" says Bruce Rosen, MD, PhD, Director at the Martinos Center.
"We selected the United Imaging uMI Panorama GS because of the company's commitment to develop this novel class of PET/CT scanners," says Dr. Catana. The uMI Panorama GS is the first PET device to bring together the powerful combination of high spatial resolution, sub-200 picosecond TOF timing resolution, and a large 148 cm of PET coverage to yield sensitivity that is 40 times higher than a conventional PET scanner. "These unique capabilities will give researchers and clinicians across MGB the ability to simultaneously image physiologic systems over the whole body for the first time with extremely high sensitivity and resolution that will lead to a new understanding of the body and disease," says Dr. Catana. This project is the first phase of a clinical translation research program at MGB that is being led by Dr. Catana in his other role as Director of Collaborative Research and Innovation in Molecular Imaging and Dr. Marcelo Di Carli, MD, Chief of the Division of Nuclear Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
