Even though the vast majority of cancer mortality is due to metastatic disease, clinical practice indicates that current imaging tools are capable of detecting large metastases (about 0.5-1 cm in size), but rarely detect the early spread of metastatic tumor cells. Unfortunately, by the time cancer metastasis becomes clinically evident with today’s imaging techniques, the metastatic disease has progressed at a late stage prohibiting early successful interventions such as surgery or radiation. This late detection results in an unfavorable long-term patient outcome. For example, the five-year survival rate of breast cancer patients sharply decreases from 98 percent in cases with localized primary lesions to 23 percent in cases of distant large metastases.

Creating the world’s first and only simultaneous whole-body positron emission tomography/magnetic resonance (PET/MR) scanner was no small feat for Siemens Healthcare. But when my engineering colleagues and I began that long, arduous development process more than half a decade ago, we believed that if we succeeded in building such a system, they — specifically, the clinical community — would come. 

The next generation of positron emission tomography (PET) imaging agents will herald an age when PET will eclipse single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) as the “go to” modality for molecular imaging. It will do so by enabling personalized medicine through precision diagnostics, the ability to be delivered cost-effectively in a manner with less radiation to patients, by leveraging hardware advances already being commercialized, and by taking advantage of the extra throughput capacity present in the U.S. installed base of PET/CT scanners.

If you are part of a health system that has spent months building and designing a new picture archive and communications system (PACS), it is undoubtedly an exciting time. Reaching the point of PACS activation and getting staff up and running is a true milestone. Once your company reaches this point, it may feel like the hard work is over and that it is time to take a deep breath, but in reality there is still much more to do and questions that have to be answered in order to fully support your organization during and post PACS go-live.