Improved Lesion Detection with Time-of-Flight PET Scans Affirmed
Data analysis has demonstrated that time-of-flight (TOF) positron emission tomography (PET) scans can improve cancer detection. Research in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine shows that oncologic TOF fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET scans yielded significant improvements in lesion detection of lung and liver cancers over all contrasts and body mass indexes.
Conventional PET scans create images by detecting gamma rays produced by radioisotopes that are injected into the body. Although these conventional scans track where the gamma rays go, they don’t consider the time it takes for each gamma ray to reach the detector.TOF PET scans do take into account the travel time, which results in improved image signal-to-noise.
Improved lesion detection was observed in the TOF PET scans, with the greatest gains achieved in the shortest-acquisition studies and in the subjects with a BMI of 30 or more. Also of note-the greatest gain in performance was achieved at the lowest lesion contrast and the smallest gain in performance at the highest lesion contrast.
Nuclear medicine technologists and physicians may be able to take advantage of the gain achieved with TOF PET to reduce scanning time, therefore increasing patient comfort and minimizing patient motion. They may also be able to reduce the injected radiopharmaceutical dose, thereby reducing the exposure of patients and health professionals to radiation.
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