Clinical Applications of PET and PET-CT

Positron emission tomography (PET) and PET/ computed tomography (CT) are emerging as important imaging techniques and their popularity is growing within the medical fraternity. Though PET has been a useful research tool for many decades its real growth into clinical applications has occurred in the last one decade or so. Currently its major use is in oncologic imaging. However it has a multitude of clinical applications in cardiology, neurology and psychiatry as well. In oncologic imaging, a major advantage of PET is that a single whole-body examination can provide accurate assessment of disease activity and spread. PET/CT amalgamates the functional information of PET with the structural details of the CT scan, thus greatly aiding in accurate staging, therapy response assessment and early detection of recurrent disease.