From the June 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

This portable PET scanner is novel in its form and function, and will unleash the power of PET imaging in therapy settings (surgery, radiation, and ablation therapy). It will transform PET from a diagnostic system to a theranostic one (theranostics, meaning therapeutic and diagnostic at once) that can be used at the point-of-care. It will bring urgently needed physiologic imaging to other interventions such as percutaneous thermal ablation and Y-90 embolization.

Catheter-based intra-myocardial delivery of therapeutics such as stem cells, anti-inflammatory agents, and genetic material is being explored for the treatment of heart disease. Current technologies rely on electrical or anatomical features to guide delivery to specific locations in the heart (e.g. fluoroscopy, electromechanical mapping). Molecular signals from PET radiotracers provide functional information that may be useful in guiding intra-myocardial therapeutic delivery. A PET scanner in an intervention room may identify injured myocardium via endocardial detection of IV-delivered PET radiotracers in real-time PET images, as well as intra-ventricular radiation detectors, and guide delivery of therapeutics to injured tissue via direct intra-myocardial injections.


With portable imaging in the operating room or a catheterization laboratory come many new theranostic procedures never imagined before. Clinical demand is moving rapidly, and requires a reconfiguration of technology in which nuclear tracers are used to guide treatment in real time. By reconfiguring PET-design we are afforded new windows into the future of patient theranostics never achieved before in medicine.

About the author: Farhad Daghighian, PhD is president and chief scientist at Prescient Imaging, LLC

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