Image of the Year 2003

The Society of Nuclear Medicine's 2003 Image of the Year is an example of technological improvements that enable a diagnostic quality whole-body PET study to be obtained in under ten minutes. "This image," declared Dr. Henry Wagner, "represents a significant advance in achieving high throughput in PET scanning without sacrificing quality." Wagner, who introduced the image at the Society of Nuclear Medicine's 50th Annual Meeting, noted that whole-body scans traditionally take up to one and half hours. "Use of technology such as 3D-LSO PET/CT could decrease the duration substantially, benefiting nuclear medicine professionals by improving efficiency, and benefiting patients by decreasing the time involved in preparing for and undergoing the scan."

Researchers at the Ahmanson Biological Imaging Clinic, UCLA School of Medicine, including Dr. Johannes Czernin and Dr. Benjamin Halpern, produced the images as part of their study examining the impact of acquisition time on image quality.

"PET/CT is an invaluable tool in the diagnosis, staging, treatment, and monitoring of a number of diseases, particularly cancer and neurological disorders," said Czernin, Director of the Nuclear Medicine Clinic at UCLA and a member of the board of directors of CPS Innovations. Using a patient weight based protocol, the UCLA team routinely achieves the rapid study times. "These fast PET protocols allow us to scan patients in as little as seven minutes, without compromising the diagnostic information. The less time that a patient has to lie immobile, the better the image quality due to reduced motion artifacts. With the 3D-LSO PET/CT, our current average imaging time is less than 15 minutes per patient."

A 60-year-old patient with recurrent head and neck cancer and body weight of 225 lb. (102 kg.) presents with a 1.5 cm superior mediastinal lymph node cancer (red arrow) in an image obtained at three minutes during an upper-body PET scan. Image courtesy of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and the Ahmanson Clinic for Biological Imaging at the UCLA School of Medicine.