From the October 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


On behalf of Toshiba, Narayan says they do not see a significant market need for manufacturing their own hybrid PET MR scanner. “PET/MR is a very expensive investment and we’re still figuring out what clinical application makes it better than individual MR or PET.”

To that end, Clarkson says, “The whole area of cancer detection and the infusion of MR and PET is still in its infancy, we’re still finding new applications.”


Debate about contrast
Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital’s Boop says as image quality gets better and better we are able to see things we’ve never seen before, and some of these things may be alarming to the eye despite being harmless to the health of the patient. These incidentals are a price physicians pay for the implementation of newer and more advanced imaging solutions.

“Someone gets a scan for headaches and finds out they have a little cyst or something like that,” says Boop, “and they want to know whether it’s dangerous or not, requires surgery or not.” Boop believes these interpretive challenges raise the bar on modern physicians to understand and interpret the findings of their MR images.
HCBN discussed this phenomenon with Alberto Spinazzi, senior vice president of Bracco Group, which manufactures contrast agents for MR interpretation. He describes it as a problem of false positives and compares contrast agents with Boop’s high quality images.

At Toshiba they utilize what they call non-contrast imaging techniques. Suresh Narayan describes their use on behalf of the company, “You can image any vasculature in the body from head to toe.” This allows for a better visualization of vascular, while eliminating the need for gadolinium-based injections.

Narayan says the threat of contracting nephrogenic systemic fibrosis (NSF) as a side effect from contrast agents was a determining factor in pursuing alternatives to traditional contrast agents. Toshiba began working on non-contrast imaging in 1998 and today their Vantage Titan suite offers an entire line of contrast-free techniques. “Of course contrast imaging will continue for traditional MR imaging,” says Narayan, “but for vascular imaging we now have these non-contrast imaging techniques.”

Spinazzi says contrast agents first hit the market around 1988. Since then they have been used in millions of procedures, sometimes to diagnose multiple sclerosis, monitor treatment, or detect metastases. Spinazzi says it has been established that the benefits of contrast agents outweigh the risks. “Certainly there are known risks and NSF is one of them, but it’s very rare.”

October 2014 Magazine

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