A Tool to Fight Cancer
Detailed PET/CT Information for Patients & Physicians
OU Medical Center uses the GE Discovery STE, the latest and most advanced PET/CT scanner available. Where other facilities in the state might have two or four slice CT units, the PET/CT scanner at OU Medical Center has a 16-slice CT.
Compared to stand-alone PET, correcting for attenuation can be done much faster with the Discovery STE PET/CT scanner, which has a built-in 16-slice CT that creates a map of the patient attenuation. In addition, this brings more precision to lesion localization because of the combination of the metabolic PET image with an anatomic image from the CT.
Cancer & PET/CT
The GE Discovery ST is designed to help physicians diagnose and localize cancer faster than ever before, with its advanced technology that produces images that provide anatomic and metabolic information that result from a single exam in a single system.
PET/CT Can Answer Critical Questions
PET/CT Can Improve Precision
Breast Cancer Early diagnosis and treatment is the key to fighting Breast Cancer. Mammography is a huge help in detecting breast cancer. However, cancers can be missed in women with breast implants or dense breast tissue, making PET/CT an optimal choice. Important to diagnosis, primary staging, recurrence, and monitoring the effectiveness of treatments is the thorough picture PET/CT imaging can bring.
Melanoma metastases can be found at unusual sites. With conventional imaging modalities, these may be easily missed. PET imaging brings the sensitivity necessary to catch melanoma even if it has spread to an elusive area. Similarly, it can be hard to identify the exact location of such abnormalities. The fusion of PET with a CT scan allows the precise localization of melanoma and can assist in decisions about further aging, biopsy, or therapies.
The value of PET imaging for finding and treating lymphoma is seen because of its high sensitivity. However localization of a lesion can be difficult--especially for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, since extranodal disease can occur almost anywhere. Fusion from PET/CT imaging is valuable in localizing the lesion accurately, and for those requiring a biopsy it can bring confidence to determination of the biopsy site.
Benefits of Using Our PET/CT for Physicians
Benefits for Patients
Technical Information GE's Discovery STE PET/CT scanner contains the ideal PET components that add up to optimized performance. It is the only detector optimized for both 3D and 2D imaging with full septa for optimal imaging of patients of all sizes. Isotropic crystal design also accurately shows lesion size and shape. It features thick 30-mm BGO detector crystals, selected for effectiveness with cancer radiotracers for the highest stopping power in the industry. Discovery STE's PET also contains square quad photomultiplier tubes specially engineered to boost the detector's efficiency at collecting image information significantly.
The Discovery STE also includes a full-featured GE LightSpeed 16-slice CT with attenuation correction - the best on the market for oncology and cardiovascular applications. It simultaneously acquires multiple adjacent slices of anatomy with solid-state GE HiLight Matrix detectors with high X-ray stopping power, low afterglow, z-axis uniformity and transparency. Its optimized image quality covers a full range of applications with speeds of up to 0.5 seconds and variable scan speeds adjustable in 0.1-second increments. It can also serve as a stand-along CT.