Residents in the Okanagan who are battling cancer will, in the near future, no longer have to travel to Vancouver for scans, the B.C. Cancer foundation announced on Wednesday morning.
“We are extraordinarily pleased to announce that we have completed in a very short year, a $5-million fundraising campaign to bring the PET/CT scanner to B.C. Cancer Kelowna,” B.C. Cancer Foundation president and CEO Sarah Roth announced during a press conference. “This completes the B.C. Cancer Foundation’s $10-million provincial PET/CT campaign, which also funded the scanner in Victoria as well.”
Right now there are only two PET/CT scanners in all of B.C. And both are in Vancouver. That means long commutes or flights for local cancer patients.
“You’re ill, you have children at home to care for or you’re elderly or you are just so unwell and not feeling like you want to make that trip,” Roth said. “For some people, they opt not to go and get the scan which then impacts the care because the physicians don’t know exactly where their cancer is.”
The scanner for Kelowna is expected to be ready for use by spring or summer of 2020.
PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography. According to several web sites, such as Radiologyinfo.org, PET scans use small amounts of radioactive materials called radiotracers, a special camera and a computer to help evaluate your organ and tissue functions. By identifying body changes at the cellular level, a PET scan may detect the early onset of disease before it is evident on other imaging tests.
“The information for pet ct scans may make some patients who weren’t curable before curable today,” radiation oncologist and Kelowna medical regional director Dr. Ross Halperin said. “Because we know where the cancer is and that allows us to either apply surgery or radiation which are focal treatments.”
Another website says the patient is first injected with a glucose (sugar) solution that contains a very small amount of radioactive material. The substance is absorbed by the particular organs or tissues being examined. The patient rests on a table and slides into a large tunnel-shaped scanner. The PET/CT scanner is then able to “see” damaged or cancerous cells where the glucose is being taken up (cancer cells often use more glucose than normal cells) and the rate at which the tumor is using the glucose (which may help determine the tumor grade). The procedure is painless and varies in length, depending on the part of the body that is being evaluated.
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