PET/CT database helps daily clinical practice

Researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston have developed a PET/CT database of clinical data that are not usually available through conventional PACS and HIS/RIS.

Jeffery Yap, Ph.D., and colleagues at the institute's nuclear medicine/PET department use the database to query previous patient studies. The database contains more than 100 parameters organized in a variety of tables to optimize data entry and retrieval. It provides PET acquisition time, FDG dose, uptake time, CT technique, and plasma glucose level, among other figures. The investigators presented their findings in a poster at the 2007 SNM meeting (J Nucl Med 2007;48[Suppl 2]:199P).

"We use this information to ensure each patient's scan is performed consistently for repeat visits," Yap said.