Advantages of Positron Emission Tomography
1) 3D reconstruction technique of Positron Emission Tomography have better sensitivity.
2) PET is widely used in preclinical studies using animals
3) PET is capable of detecting areas of molecular biology details
4)1t is a valuable technique because it is possible to target the radio chemicals used for particular bodily functions.
5) PET scans are increasingly read alongside CT or MRI scans. This combination gives both anatomic and metabolic information.
6) Modern PET scanners are now available with integrated high-end multi-detector row CT scanners
7) By the combination of PET and CT scans, the areas of abnormality on the PET imaging can be more perfectly correlated with anatomy on the CT images
8) A wide variety of radionuclides such as carbon-11, nitrogen- 13, oxygen-15, fluorine -18 etc can be used in PET scanning.
9) The PET technology can be used to trace the biologic pathway of any compound in living humans provided it can be radio labeled with a PET isotope.
10) So the specific processes that can be probed with PET are virtually limitless.
11) The minimization of radiation dose close to the subject is an attractive feature of the use of short lived radio nuclides.
Limitations of Positron Emission Tomography
1) Due to the short half-lives of most radioisotopes , the radio tracers need to be produced using cyclotron nearer to the PET imaging facility.
2) High costs of cyclotron needed to produce the short-lived radio nuclides for PET scanning limits the wide spread use of PET
3) Another limitation is the need for specially adapted on-site chemical synthesis apparatus to produce the radio pharmaceuticals.
4) Most clinical PET is supported by third party suppliers of radioiracers dial can supply many sites simultaneously. This may lead to availability prob, iems.
5) The PET data suffer from scatter and random events much more dramatically than CT data.
Author Bio: The Author of this article, Sreejith is writing articles on Biomedical Instrumentation and Electronics and Communications
