From the June 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


“In the future, PET scans will take about two to three minutes,” Mawlawi predicted.

Utilizing special features
At New Century Imaging in Oradell, New Jersey, about 20 miles northwest of midtown Manhattan, Dr. David Panush takes advantage of iterative Metal Artifact Reduction (iMAR) technology on the Biograph Horizon PET/CT system from Siemens Healthineers that the facility purchased over a year ago.

Panush, who is also section head of nuclear medicine and CT at Hackensack University Medical Center, which does more than 17 PET scans per day, has long used the iMAR technology on the CT portion of the system. He recently began using iMAR with PET for the purposes of attenuation correction.

The advantage of the PET/CT system is that it fuses anatomical images with PET images, Panush said. When a patient has surgical implants, such as a prosthetic hip or shoulder, bursts of metal artifacts take up the entire image.

“When you have metal artifacts … your PET CT really becomes just a PET,” Panush explained. “The metal propagates throughout the image.”

Panush’s practice has been processing some cases without the software to see if there’s a difference.

If the PET/CT was done without the iMAR technology, the patient would have to be exposed to more radiation, Panush explained. Even when the radiation dose is increased, there is still some interruption from the metal artifacts.

The Hackensack Radiology Group, which New Century Imaging is part of, has been participating in the American College of Radiology’s Dose Index Registry (DIR), which allows practices to compare their CT doses to other facilities regionally and nationally with quarterly reports.

“Ours has always been at or significantly below the average dose throughout the country,” Panush said.

A more sensitive scanner is also important to test novel radioactive tracers being developed to detect low activity for diseases like prostate cancer.

“You need a scanner with high resolution and increased sensitivity,” Panush said. “As a radiologist, you want to always provide an accurate interpretation that will help the patient as best you can with the current technology. If you stay with old technology, which cannot show the hotspots as well, you can have a delay in diagnosis and a delay in treatment.”

Cutting-edge research
Many urban facilities, with a wealth of resources, are at the forefront of clinical trials using novel imaging agents.

At the Ahmanson Translational Imaging Division at UCLA, there are several clinical trials underway to study prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA)-directed theranostics in prostate cancer.

June 2018 Magazine

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