Nuclear Medicine techniques are often used to look at many organ systems in the body and determine a patient’s best treatment option.
These techniques use Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan. A PET scan is used to detect cellular reactions to sugar. Abnormal cells tend to react and "light up" on the scan, thus helping physicians diagnose a variety of conditions. For the PET scan, a harmless chemical, called a radiotracer, is injected into your blood stream. Once it has had time to move through your body, you will lie on a table while a scanner follows the radiotracer and sends three-dimensional images to a computer screen. This is used in the staging, re-staging, and evaluation process of the therapeutic response in a variety of cancers.