Beebe Healthcare's Rehoboth campus has deployed new technology to more thoroughly scan cancer patients.
A PET scanner can detect damaged or cancerous cells in 45 minutes, but Beebe’s new PET-CT scanner combines two technologies to get results in about 20 minutes.
Before the scan, a doctor injects a patient with a sugar solution that has a small amount of radiation. The organs being examined absorb the sugar. A patient then sits on a table and is slid into the scanner, which then finds the cells that are absorbing the most sugar.
"In a cancer patient, tumors tend to grow faster than normal tissue, so they uptake at a higher rate and then they show up as hotspots on the scan," said Dan Mapes, the executive director for Diagnostic & Satellite Services with Beebe.
The new system can find cancer lesions in their early stages or see how a patient’s cells are doing after chemotherapy. Mapes said PET scans find where the cancer cells are growing, but they don’t give precise information on the cells’ anatomy, which is where the CT scan help.
"If a lesion has not declined or has in fact, grown, then you know that the chemo is not working and it’s time to re-evaluate and find a different chemo treatment that may work better," Mapes said.
Mapes said they’re currently scanning oncology patients, but they’d like to eventually use the technology for patients with alzheimer's or arthritis as well.
Over the last month, Beebe has scanned 45 patients with the PET-CT scan.
Beebe and its partners, the Longwood Foundation and the Welfare Foundation, invested $2.5 million in the technology as part of Beebe's overall cancer treatment program.
