OREANDA-NEWS.   Accurate treatment response and excellent image quality in PET imaging is on full display this week by GE Healthcare at the 2014 European Congress of Radiology (ECR). GE Healthcare’s interactive educational experience on PET regularized reconstruction technology is designed to show what is possible when forcing a choice between image quality or quantitation accuracy is no longer necessary.

When determining whether cancer treatment is effective, clinicians require accurate quantitative tools, the ability to detect the smallest of lesions, and the ability to earlier determine whether metabolic activity is being mitigated under current treatment.

“We know that cancer patients don’t always respond to their initial course of treatment,” said Steve Gray, president and CEO of GE Healthcare’s MICT business. “If we can give clinicians a more accurate, reliable, and faster tool to confirm that a change in treatment is needed, the patient will benefit greatly. For example, PET/CT can help clinicians determine whether chemotherapy is working after as few as 1-2 cycles, potentially saving patients unnecessary procedures and a significant amount of money.”

Over the last decade, PET image reconstruction technology has been designed to provide better image quality, reduced acquisition time and lower injected dose. Current PET iterative reconstruction technologies, such as Time of Flight (TOF) and OSEM, are not able to control noise when the number of iterations increases which leads to a trade-off of quantitative accuracy in favor of image quality. PET regularized reconstruction technology on display at EANM interactively shows the potential of full convergence PET imaging.
GE Healthcare’s Q.Suite introduced the importance of eliminating variability such as respiratory motion. Q.Suite enables clinicians to assess treatment response more accurately than ever before, enabling them to confidently assess biological changes in a patient during course of treatment.

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