NeuroLove

PET and cancer?

FLT PET is a relatively newer way to look at cancer. This shows the image of a woman with leukemia (blood cell/bone marrow cancer) before and after chemotherapy. FLT is similar to FDG (which is the glucose usage monitoring PET ligand I discussed before). FLT also shows glucose usage but it seems to be better at showing cancer-related cell division activity than FDG is. It won’t of course only show cancer activity, but it might help to visualize cancer during treatments and thus, treatment success. This is an interesting usage of PET and I’ll be curious to see if as time goes on it will become more mainstream. I think it’s really interesting that you can see the affected bone marrow here. This is not a structural scan at all- you do not get to see bones with PET- it’s not like x-rays or CT scans. PET is functional imaging, which means you just see where that radioligand is active, and in this case, you can see it in bone marrow, and it almost looks like a colored x-ray! Of course, PET imaging itself has some downsides, which I will try to talk about in the future that might prevent something like this from becoming more commonplace.

[Image Source]