Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Scan

What is Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Scan?

PET is an advanced medical imaging examination that is able to give a thorough insight on the functions of an organ or system in your body. PET scans more often carried out to give diagnosis on cancers, neurological (brain) disorders, and cardiovascular (heart) diseases.

Through the PET scan process, a radioactive tracer is injected and images of your body is being recorded. A camera detects the emissions from the injected radioactive tracer and forms multi-dimensional images that are computer generated. Generally, the injected radiotracers accumulates in diseased tissues more than healthier tissues. There are more PET scanners being put together with computerised Tomography (CT) scans. This enables the information gathered by CT images to be put along with the PET's functional data.

Essentially, PET scans are for providing accurate diagnosis and to monitor conditions that includes cancers, neurological (brain) disorder, and cardiovascular (heart-related) diseases. In the early stages, they can go detected by using other imaging techniques (such as CT and MRI scans). Mainly, it helps your doctor to determine which stage the cancer is in, where and how much it has spread to various parts of the body.

A PET scan will be able to contribute in determining whether surgery will be necessary for epileptic seizures by providing information on which part of the brain is responsible for your epilepsy. Also, this scan benefits by examining Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's as the images are able to help determine the areas where the brain does not function normally. If able to detect in the early stages for these neurological disorders, treatment offered will be more effective.