From the June 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


All of these challenges need to be ironed out before PET/MR can enjoy the same success that PET/CT has. “There are multi-faceted things that are going on in here and it takes time for all of them to be aligned in a way that you will see PET/MR as a reality out there that people want,” says Jadvar.

PET/CT will still dominate
Most of the experts interviewed for this story agree that PET/MR will never replace PET/CT. “The purpose of this new imaging modality is not to replace PET/CT, there is no sense in replacing a modality that is working well and that has been established for almost 20 years now for certain indications,” says Herrmann.
Market forecast reports even prove that PET/CT will still experience significant growth in the coming years. The Advisory Board Company projected in May 2012 that PET/CT will grow 22 percent over the next five years and 55 percent over the next 10 years and technological advances are one of the main drivers.

One of the most recent advances is GE’s new Q.Clear technology. The technology uses the regularized reconstruction iterative algorithm, as opposed to the conventional ordered subsets expectation maximization algorithm. GE says that the new algorithm improves PET quantitation accuracy and image quality up to two times.

One of the disadvantages of OSEM is that it generally can’t run to full convergence because the noise of the image grows with each iteration. In order to compensate for that in clinical use, the algorithm is usually stopped after a few iterations to provide a decent contrast recovery at an acceptable noise. But the result is an under-converged image with standard uptake value quantitative bias, which impacts the lesion quantitation.

“The breakthrough that Q.Clear introduces is to take away that compromise,” says Wei Shen, global PET/CT general manager at GE. “It’s a new method that can suppress the noise level as it converges so you can get to a very clear image to read from, as well as a very good fully convergent measurement that you can also trust.”

It’s currently available for the Discovery PET/CT 710 premium configuration but GE’s goal is to have it across all of their production products, as well as the recent portions of the installed base in the future.

Accurate quantitation is becoming more important now that clinicians are using PET not only for diagnosing and staging a disease but also for treatment monitoring. “We definitely see that to be the trend that it’s not just used in the early part of the pathway, but also throughout the entire continuum — for staging, restaging, as well as treatment assessment,” says Shen.

June 2014 Magazine

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