The whole body PET Scan creates pictures of organs and tissues inside the human body. The Explorer is the only scanner in the world that combines PET and CT. It was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2019. The Explorer PET/CT scanner has a 194 cm axial field sufficient to cover the whole human body in a single acquisition.
In addition, it allows total-body pharmacokinetic studies with a frame duration of 1 second. The substantial increase in sensitivity is due to the total-body coverage. Another factor is the increased solid angle (the field of view measurement) for detection at any point within the body. This allows a whole-body PET Scan fusion with computed tomography imaging on injection with the radiotracer 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG).
Researchers have used the Explorer PET/CT scanner to illustrate that a ‘sugar’ type radiotracer can be taken up only by bacterial cells. Therefore, this radiotracer can be injected into a patient’s bloodstream with a bacterial infection to locate it in the body. Other radiotracers are being developed to distinguish between types of bacteria and demonstrate how drugs move through the body using the Explorer PET/CT scanner.
This next generation of total body PET/CT scanners requires less radioactive exposure because the Explorer PET scanner is faster than conventional PET scanners, which can take up to 20 minutes. In conventional PET imaging, the gamma rays are detected from radioactive tracers when injected into the patient. The cells within the tissues and organs take up the radiopharmaceutical and then release two gamma rays of 511 keV.
The rotating detector ring is positioned around the person and measures the angle and speed of the gamma rays. A 3-D map of the radiotracer undergoing metabolism within the cells is reconstructed during this process. This ring in a conventional PET scanner is about 25 cm wide and can only image a specific portion of the body simultaneously. To produce a whole body PET scan, a larger radioactive dose would be required to maintain a gamma signal for detection because the patient would have to move backwards and forward through the ring.
To circumvent this problem, the Explorer PET/CT produces a whole-body PET Scan by connecting eight PET scanner rings into a 2 m long tube that can image the entire body simultaneously. This breakthrough in PET/CT imaging creates a rendering (a method of extracting meaningful information from a 3-D dataset) in 1/40 of the time of a conventional scanner. Most importantly, the radiation risk is reduced by using 1/40 of the radiation dose.
Another aspect of the Explorer PET/CT scanner is that the patient can undergo scanning for extended periods. Video-tracking technology can be used to see the radioactive tracer moving throughout the body via the bloodstream in real time.
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