Your physician may include Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans as part of your cancer care treatment plan, as PET can greatly improve their ability to evaluate and treat your disease.
PET allows a physician to examine large areas of the body in a single scanning session, producing images that are unobtainable using other techniques. PET images can uncover abnormalities that might otherwise go undetected, and they can also help identify which abnormalities are malignant and which are benign. This valuable information helps your physicians determine your best treatment options.
PET scans are safe and can be performed in a few hours as an outpatient procedure. When you receive a PET scan, you will be injected with a small amount of radioactive glucose - called a "tracer" - that is distributed throughout your body. After relaxing for about an hour, you will lie on a scanning bed that moves slowly through the PET scanner while it detects the injected tracer. The scanner sends the resulting information to a computer that generates images to be analyzed by a specially-trained radiologist.
PET/CT is a relatively new imaging tool that combines two scan techniques in one - a PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scan and a CT scan. PET/CT is mainly used for diagnosis, staging or restaging cancer and for evaluation of treatment response. Together the two procedures provide information about the location, nature of and the extent of a tumor. It answers questions such as: where is the tumor, how big is it, is it malignant, benign or due to inflammatory change, and has it spread?
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