How Does A Pet Ct Scan The Whole Body And Show Everything?

Pet CT scan also known as Positron emission tomography is basically a nuclear medicine medical imaging method.

In order to conduct this scan, a short term radioactive tracer isotope, is injected into the body usually into a blood circulation. This is usually chemically included into a metabolically active molecule. Over a period of time this molecule becomes active and is concentrated in various tissues of interest. Usually this waiting time is for around an hour and the most known molecule is fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG), which is basically a sugar.

Now the radioisotope undergoes something known as positive beta decay, which in turn emits a positron. Now it begins to move in the upward direction and after a while it encounters and annihilates with an electron, which in turn manages to produce a kind of gamma photons, which usually move in the opposite direction. These are generally directed when they arrive at a scintillator stuff in the scanning piece of equipment, creating a rupture of light which is detected by photomultiplier tubes or silicon avalanche photodiodes. Pet scans are generally helped alongside with either CT scans or even MRI scans. This helps us with providing information on both anatomic and metabolic information.

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