ARMC’s New Molecular Imaging Helps Detect Disease

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Athens Regional Medical Center is now offering an advanced imaging service that can detect diseases such as cancer, brain disorders and heart disease more accurately than other medical imaging. The combination Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Computerized Tomography (CT) scanner is a major breakthrough in the detection and classification of organ and tissue diseases. Recently introduced to the commercial market, ARMC began offering the service in August 2003. The PET/CT scanner, housed on the ground floor of ARMC’s Medical Services Building on King Avenue, cost approximately $2 million. It will serve patients from ARMC, physician offices and other medical facilities in a 17-county region.

Bernard A. Wheatley, MBA, FACHE, ARMC’s Vice-President of Operations, said the hospital is committed to providing state-of-the-art healthcare services to the community.

“PET and CT are triumphs of technology that have saved countless lives, prolonged others and often made exploratory operations unnecessary,” he said. “Yet each has limitations that can lead to uncertainties in diagnosis. By combining these two technologies, we eliminate uncertainties in diagnosis and provide medicine with a powerful new diagnostic tool.”

PET imaging offers physicians a unique picture of the body’s organs and tissues by showing metabolism at a molecular level. To do this, glucose (tagged with a radioactive tracer) is injected into the body. Organs adsorb the glucose, allowing a metabolic image to be made. Cancer cells in tumors, for example, absorb sugars (glucose) faster than healthy tissue, and, as a result, appear brighter in the image than other normal tissue.

“We can see things with PET that you can’t see any other way,” said Tom Fortune, B.S.N.M.T., Chief Technologist of Nuclear Medicine at ARMC. “Every patient we’ve seen has had an impact from it. We’ve either seen more disease than we thought they had or no disease at all.”

He said the information obtained by PET is not only beneficial in diagnosing disease but, if necessary, changing a patient’s course of treatment.

“We can see when conventional chemotherapies have failed and we need to change to another type of therapy,” he said. “PET can tell us when there’s still active disease in the body.”

Clinical experience shows the PET/CT image provides valuable information, including early diagnosis, more accurate tumor detection and precise localization of disease, as well as improved biopsy sampling and better assessment of patient responses to chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

Dr. Ron Terry, a radiation oncologist at ARMC, said the PET/CT scanner provides immeasurable assistance in detecting and localizing cancer.

“By overlaying the PET on the CT we can see more accurately where the cancer is,” he said. “The disease will actually light up, allowing us to contour the exact area that needs to be treated. It takes the guesswork out of where the cancer begins and where it ends. It’s a major advancement.”

For more information about PET imaging, contact your Primary Care Physician, radiation specialist or ARMC’s radiology department at (706) 475-3676.