Hybrid PET/CT scanners provided the excitement at the mid-June annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine. Vendors, led by GE Medical Systems—and its pre-SNM media blitz—hyped the clinical and economic importance of their newly christened products.
GE described its Discovery family of CT/positron imagers as breakthrough technology. Initially shown as a work-in-progress at the 2000 RSNA meeting, the Discovery LS combines the company’s best dedicated PET scanner, Advance NXi, and its super premium CT, LightSpeed. At midtier is a repackaged work-in-progress version of SMV’s Positrace, outfitted with a HiSpeed CT scanner and new crystal and renamed Discovery VI. Filling out the family is Discovery VH, a dual-head gamma camera combined with CT technology.
Siemens Medical Solutions, which has been developing tools to fuse CT and nuclear medicine images for the better part of a decade and has the longest clinical experience with hybrid PET/CT scanning, showcased its Biograph PET/CT scanner, originally unveiled at the 2000 RSNA meeting. Philips ADAC directed attention to its work-in-progress Gemini PET/CT scanner. Both companies have less costly gamma cameras outfitted for positron imaging: Siemens’ E.CAM Duet and ADAC’s Forte.
The flagship products—Discovery LS, Biograph, and Gemini—represent the largest single diagnostic investment radiology can make. These hybrids are literally two devices rolled into one and, when million-dollar multislice scanners join $1.5 million dedicated PET systems, list prices swell to more than $2 million. Despite the astronomical price tags, vendors predict gangbuster sales. Vendors already have a substantial investment in PET/CT scanners. GE, for example, has invested $50 million in development of Discovery LS, which lists for $2.7 million.
At a New York City press conference in the days before the meeting and again on the SNM exhibit floor, GE’s vice president and general manager of global functional and molecular imaging, Beth Klein, predicted customers would buy 500 Discovery products over the next three years. On the SNM exhibit floor, Siemens’ strategic marketing manager, Elbert Lands, asserted that Siemens would keep pace with GE. But neither company would predict how many sales would be CT/gamma cameras or dedicated PET/CTs.
Lost in the promotional flurry was the fact that fewer than a dozen PET/CT systems have actually entered clinical service, and early experience indicates their use might be justified only under very specific circumstances.
“Hybrid systems fit in a number of areas but not in all of therapeutic monitoring for cancer and not in all of cancer staging,” said Dr. Carolyn C. Metzler, medical director of the University of Pittsburgh PET facility. “They really fit where our conventional imaging has trouble—certain anatomic areas and certain tumors that are notoriously difficult to image.”
