Mobile PET Scanning Services Available at St. Luke's PET Scanning Detects, Stages and Assesses Cancer

St. Luke's Nuclear Medicine Department is offering mobile positron emission tomography scanning services that give oncologists and their patients the opportunity to find out "what's happening" with the functioning of a cancer by detecting, staging and assessing it. St. Luke's provides PET scanning services every Tuesday from 8:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. from a mobile unit located at 6600 Main in the parking lot directly across from St. Luke's Medical Tower. Designated parking for patients scheduled for PET scans are immediately adjacent to the mobile unit.

"PET scanning has been recognized as the gold standard for metabolic imaging because nothing can compete with it for specific clinical applications," said Dr. Warren Moore, chief of nuclear medicine at St. Luke's. "For those hard-to-quantify lung lesions, lymphoma, melanoma, and for distinguishing scar tissue from active lesions and detecting metastases, the superior sensitivity of this technology gives us very precise disease information."

"One of PET's biggest advantages is that it is an alternative to more invasive procedures such as needle-aspiration biopsy, fiber-optic bronchoscopic biopsy, or surgery. This technology has been thoroughly researched throughout the United States and around the world, and it offers us superb diagnostic capability," said Dr. Brian Miles, medical director, St. Luke's Texas Cancer Institute. "Offering this service allows us to avoid unnecessary invasive testing and surgery, increase patient comfort, and reduce patient complications and mortality, while at the same time saving health care dollars."

For a PET scan, the patient is injected with a form of glucose (a common substance that every cell in the body needs to function) that has a minute amount of a signal-emitting radioisotope attached. FDG, as it is called, is the most common radiopharmaceutical used in PET scanning. But, depending on the metabolic function being tracked, other drugs may be employed. As the solution travels through the body, the glucose is absorbed by cells, especially by active cancer cells. Most cells consume glucose, but cancer cells often do so faster than healthy cells because they expend so much energy dividing. Thus, if an area in an organ is cancerous, the signals will be stronger than in surrounding tissue.

A scanner records these signals and transforms them into pictures of chemistry and function. The PET scanning process itself usually takes about 45 minutes.

Although PET has been an available diagnostic technique since the 1970s, it wasn't until 1998 that the Health Care Financing Administration approved PET for Medicare reimbursement for staging non-small-cell lung cancer and for characterizing indeterminate solitary pulmonary nodules. In July of 1999, and again this year, additional Medicare-covered indications were approved, such as the detection and localization of recurrent colorectal carcinoma with an unexplained rising carcinoembryonic antigen; the staging and characterization of primary and recurrent Hodgkin's disease or non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in place of gallium imaging; and the identification of metastases in suspected melanoma recurrence.

PET isn't the only imaging technology available to physicians. Conventional imaging equipment such as X-ray, CT, ultrasound or MRI are efficient at showing what the image's bodily structure or anatomy looks like. PET's difference is that its images contain information about tissue function and metabolism. PET can also detect tumor recurrence much earlier than anatomical-imaging tests because the structures being studied in anatomical tests must change significantly in size, shape or composition before cancer growth is detectable. PET technology may also help decide a related issue in oncology - response to chemotherapy. For more information about St. Luke's PET scanning services, call (713) 791-3126.

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