PENSACOLA, Fla. – Sacred Heart Hospital now offers the region’s most advanced and highly accurate PET CT imaging system for cancer detection. The newest PET CT with LSO Crystal Technology was recently acquired by PET/CT Imaging Centers of Northwest Florida, a joint venture of Pensacola Radiology Consultants and Sacred Heart Health System. The 40-slice imaging system has been operational since late November and is an upgrade to the previous one-slice PET CT imaging system.

“We are pleased to offer the fastest, most accurate PET CT imaging capabilities in our region,” says Sidney Scarborough, Sacred Heart VP of Operations and Ambulatory Care. “This new system’s technology provides the largest PET CT field of view available and provides the clearest, most diagnostically useful images in the industry, all in about half the time of any other scanner in this region.”

PET CT imaging is especially useful in diagnosing cancer and in measuring the effects of cancer treatment on a tumor. A CT scan produces detailed pictures of internal anatomy, and that information is merged with a simultaneously acquired PET scan, allowing physicians to view biological or metabolic activity. The combined scans permit accurate tumor detection for cancers such as lymphoma, melanoma, and cancers of the lung, colon, head and neck, breast, cervix, ovaries and brain.

Dr. Frank Abbott, a radiologist and the area’s only fellowship-trained nuclear medicine specialist, agrees that the new Biograph® imaging system, developed by Siemens Medical Systems, provides greatly improved information needed by physicians for accurate diagnoses. “These diagnostic imaging capabilities increase our ability to detect the tiniest abnormalities in the clearest detail and see changes in molecular activity even before anatomical changes become visible,” Says Dr. Abbott. “The ability to pinpoint the exact location, size, nature and extent of disease at its earliest stage allows us to make more accurate diagnoses and begin treatment much earlier than before.”

Computed tomography (CT) is a diagnostic procedure using special x-ray equipment to obtain detailed cross-sectional pictures of organs, bones and other tissues. Positron Emission Tomography (PET), is a test that utilizes an injected radiotracer which seeks out areas in the body with increased function or metabolism. The signals produced by this “tracer” agent are then detected and converted to images of abnormal cell activity caused by cancer.

For more information, please contact PET/CT Imaging Center of Northwest Florida at (850) 478-6336, located in the Payne Building on the Sacred Heart Hospital Pensacola Campus.