Mayo Clinic installs 1st Quadra PET/CT scanner in North America

By KAALTV

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(ABC 6 News) – Mayo Clinic has installed a new PET/CT scanner that will dramatically improve imaging quality and speed for patients, especially for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

The Biograph Vision Quadra PET/CT scanner is the first in North America approved for clinical use, and will be scanning patients at its location in Rochester later this year.

Mayo Clinic will be the first medical center in North America to offer patients advanced diagnostic imaging using a 106-centimeter-long PET/CT with ultrafast timing resolution, resulting in the most sensitive PET/CT scanner available for clinical use.

With this new scanner, Mayo Clinic can dramatically increase the quality and speed of clinical PET/CT scanning, while at the same time reducing radiation exposure to patients. This scanner can image the patient from the top of the head to the legs simultaneously, which allows Mayo Clinic physicians to think differently and implement new approaches to identifying disease for the care of patients — approaches that are not possible with shorter and older PET/CT scanners.

Mayo radiologists anticipate that they will use this PET/CT scanner to improve the staging of cancer, and diagnosing infection as well as inflammatory, cardiovascular and neurologic diseases. This scanner will allow for the development of:

  • Systemic imaging capable of detecting very tiny sites of active cancer
  • Accurate calculations of the amount of radiopharmaceutical therapy that can be delivered to sites of cancer in a patient-specific manner
  • Whole-body 3D maps of quantitative blood flow rates to every organ and tissue
  • Scanning with more than one PET radiotracer simultaneously

“This new scanner is literally an order of magnitude more powerful than our prior best PET/CT scanners, allowing for dramatic improvements in clinical practice while also opening whole new horizons,” says Geoffrey Johnson, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Division of Nuclear Medicine in the Department of Radiology at Mayo Clinic.