Hailed as a turning point in diagnosis and therapy, Siemens Medical Solutions has unveiled the world’s first imaging system that can capture the most advanced structural images and simultaneously capture functional images by both magnetic resonance (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) respectively. This breakthrough will increase survival times dramatically since it can identify specific diagnoses more accurately and quickly.

This system will provide more detailed images, shorten imaging time, increase patient throughput, reduce health care costs, decrease errors, and give a more full picture for those diagnosed with neurological disorders, stroke and cancer. It would be an ideal technology to unravel difficult scientific mechanisms such as those involved in prenatal drug damage.

The MRI and PET (relatively new imaging technologies that are already being used in clinics) have never been combined into one entity until now. Image fusion is the way of the future, as the best structural and functional devices are brought together to see depths and details never before realized.

“PET facilitates the evaluation of molecular aspects and metabolic alterations that are fundamental in detecting of malignancies, characterization of tumor stage and assessment of therapeutical response, and tumor recurrence. The main advantage of PET is its high sensitivity in identifying of areas of cancerous involvement at an early stage. In general, the accelerated radiotracer activity occurs before anatomical structure changes. The main difficulty with PET is the lack of an anatomical reference frame. MRI is an excellent morphological imaging modality with a high anatomical resolution. Whole-body MRI produce large amounts of image data, resulting in the possibility of overlooking subtle pathological findings. The fusion of PET with MRI can compensate for their disadvantages and therefore offers several advantages in comparison to PET or MRI alone. The combination of these two excellent diagnostic imaging modalities into a single scanner improves the diagnostic accuracy by facilitating the accurate registration of molecular aspects and metabolic alterations of the diseases with exact correlation to anatomical findings and morphological information. Whole-body PET/MRI is a very promising diagnostic modality for oncological imaging and for use in cancer screening in the decades to come due to the considerably lower radiation exposure in contrast to PET/CT and the high soft tissue resolution of MRI.”
(Marcus D. Seemann, M.D., Whole-body PET/MRI: The Future in Oncological Imaging)

More information about the engineering challenges and opportunities: PET-MRI Scanners: A further evolution in diagnostic imaging

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