Friends who have known about cancer should know that it is a malignant disease, and the later it is found, the worse the treatment effect will be.
If the cancer is diagnosed at an advanced or terminal stage, the probability of survival within five years is extremely low, especially some tumors with a very high degree of malignancy, such as hepatocellular carcinoma, small cell carcinoma of the lung, pancreatic cancer, etc., and patients may die because of it in just a few months.
Because of this, clinics have always emphasized the importance of early detection and early treatment of cancer. However, there is a certain difficulty in the early detection of cancer, because most organ cancers have no symptoms at the beginning, and the patient's body can even have no abnormalities. And because the cancer is small, ordinary ultrasound and CT examinations are often difficult to find the problem.
However, fortunately, medical technology and equipment are constantly advancing, and the new PET-CT that has emerged in recent years is expected to find early lesions!
The so-called PET-CT is the integration of PET and CT on an instrument, which constitutes a very complete imaging system. During the examination, after a rapid full-body scan, the patient can obtain both ct anatomical images and PET function metabolism images.
The complementary advantages of these two images allow doctors to obtain accurate anatomical positioning while understanding the patient's biological metabolism information, and then make the most comprehensive and accurate judgment on the disease.
Compared with ordinary CT and ultrasonography, it has several advantages:
1. Early detection
PET-CT can confirm the early malignancy of the tumor, to know that the metabolism of cancer cells is very active, the ability to take up imaging agent, is more than 2-10 times that of normal cells, in the process of examination, it will form obvious light spots on the picture. Therefore, before the anatomical changes have occurred in the early stages of the tumor, the examination can find hidden tiny lesions;
2. Safer
PET-CT test is safe and non-invasive, because most of the nuclides used during the examination are the basic elements that constitute human life, or very similar nuclides, and their half-lives are very short, and the dose received is higher than that of a chest CT scan, which is safe and efficient, and can be repeated in a short period of time;
3. Accurate and fast
THROUGH qualitative and quantitative analysis, PET-CT provides accurate anatomical information, which can help the clinic better determine and find the precise location of the tumor, and its results are far more accurate than CT.
Not only that, PET-CT performs a full-body scan, which includes areas such as the neck, chest, abdomen and pelvis, which takes only about 20 minutes, which is not only more comprehensive, but also faster and more convenient than other imaging tests;
4. Cost-effective
PET-CT is able to detect early tumors and determine their nature and stage, and its treatment costs are at least 1-5 times less than those found in later tumors. Not only that, but patients who find tumors early will also have a 1-5-fold, or even 10-fold, increase in survival.
Moreover, PET-CT can accurately determine the benign and malignant nature of most tumors and whether there is metastasis in one examination, which avoids multiple tests to delay the diagnosis of the disease or specify the wrong treatment plan.
All in all, although pet-CT examination costs slightly more than CT and ultrasonography, it is actually a cost-effective examination method. Of course, this is not to allow everyone to have this test, only those who meet the high risk of cancer, such as family history, long-term discomfort symptoms, chronic disease history, age over 45 years old, etc., PET-CT test is valuable.