How is a pet scan conducted?

Track a tracer: Pet scans make use of tracers, radioactive compounds that bind to specific compounds of interest. The tracer is injected and, after a few minutes, the pet scanner looks to see where the radioactivity has ended up, and is thereby able to see how much of the compound of interest is present, and where it is located.

PET procedure: For oncologic purpose, patients should be fasting for 5-12 hours. A radioisotope tracer analogo to glucose is injected IV. Approximately 60 min later the patient is imaged on the whole body PET scanner to reveal malignant lesions. Patients are required to spend near 2 hours totally. The actual scan takes 35-45 minutes with the patient lying flat within the scanner.

Much like a CT: Pet/ct is a scanner which looks a lot like a ct scanner. However, pet scans most often use a radioactive form of glucose, the energy source for most of the cells in our bodies. The pet scanner can detect and measure how much of the radioactive glucose analog, f-18 fdg, is in a particular organ or region. The areas using more glucose are hyper metabolic and generally more concerning.