From the June 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Philips’ Ingenuity TF PET/MR involves a separate PET scanner and MR scanner positioned on each end of a patient table in the same room. GE has a trimodality system, in which the Discovery PET/CT 690 and Discovery MR 750 are situated in adjacent rooms and the patient is transferred with a detachable patient table.

GE currently has nine trimodality systems installed globally. The University Hospital in Zurich decided to purchase the system because at the time, fully integrated PET/MR was not mature and they wanted to avoid any technical problems associated with the integration of MR and PET including attenuation correction, surface coil attenuation and metallic implants, according to Dr. Gustav von Schulthess, professor and chairman of the department of medical radiology at the hospital.


But other facilities prefer the fully integrated system. Siemens has sold more than 50 of their systems worldwide and says it’s primarily used for oncologic applications, but neurologic and cardiac applications also come into play.

Siemens says it is noticing a shift with PET/MR moving into the clinical arena. “Of course, the early adopters will be at the academic centers that are looking to use the technology in novel ways — for cancer treatment response, neuroscience using novel tracers and dynamic simultaneous PET and MRI — and still there’s significant interest in that area,” says Abram Voorhees, business manager of the Biograph mMR at Siemens. “Now we are seeing a trend towards adopters that will use the system clinically.”

Along with the academic medical centers, Zwanger-Pesiri Radiology and Golisano Children’s Hospital in New York and Hoag Neurosciences Institute in California have installed systems for clinical use.

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis purchased PET/MR a little less than three years ago and they are now getting to the point where they’re ready to use it clinically—mainly for dementia and pelvic cancer research, but also more recently for cardiac imaging.

They will also use it on children and adolescents once they get all the “bugs worked out of the clinical operations,” says Dr. Robert McKinstry, a radiologist at the university.

PET/MR is particularly promising for that population because it emits less radiation than PET/CT. “The reduced dose is likely to have significant impact over the course of their lifetime,” says McKinstry.

Even though it has to undergo a few technical innovations first, McKinstry believes that in the next five to 10 years PET/MR will become just as popular as PET/CT. “I think there are many areas where it will be the go-to exam over PET/CT,” he says. “In five to 10 years, I do think we’ll have it down so you could have just one PET/MR in your practice, I think that will be possible.”

June 2014 Magazine

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