| PET CT Basics » Story of PET/CT
|
|
|
 |
Doctors, especially cancer surgeons, were often frustrated
in trying to match PET images with CT images to determine
the precise location of a tumor in relation to an organ or
the spinal column. They had little choice other than to
"eyeball" the two separate images and make an educated guess
as to the tumor's exact location - until 1992, when engineer
Ron Nutt and physicist David Townsend came up with the idea
of combining a PET and CT into one machine.
After working on their combined PET and CT concept for three
years, Nutt and Townsend received a grant from the National
Cancer Institute. This enabled the completion of a prototype
machine, which was installed at the University of Pittsburgh
medical center in 1998.
The pair designed the machine to be more patient-friendly by
making the diameter of the PET/CT tunnel 28 inches, far more
spacious than the typical MRI tunnels.
Time Magazine honored PET/CT as the "Medical Science
Invention of the Year" in 2000, noting that the PET/CT
scanner has "provided medicine with a powerful new
diagnostic tool. |
|
|
|
|
