Interventional radiology
New CT scanner with dose reduction software at Lakeland Hospital, Watervliet. This new CT scanner exposes patients to less radiation while providing doctors with clearer images to help with diagnoses, according to researchers at the National Institutes of Health. The new machine has five times as many detectors as most machines, which means that more of an organ can be captured at a time, decreasing the number of passes of the scanner required.
Computed tomography (CT) scan
Computed tomography (CT) is used to provide a three-dimensional cross section of bones and soft tissues, in the head, chest, abdomen, pelvis and extremities. The highly detailed images produced through CT scans are very useful in the diagnosis of acute illnesses such as cancer. For those patients, CT is also an effective tool for monitoring patients during and after treatment.
64-slice CT
State-of-the-art 64-slice CT scanners can be found at our St. Joseph and Niles hospitals. This technology can provide significant benefits over traditional CT scanners. Traditional CT scanners can take up to 20 minutes to produce an image. This next generation technology can produce pinpoint accurate images of the body in mere seconds without surgery. It can even capture images of the heart between beats.
PET/CT
PET/CT is considered by many experts to be a significant advance in cancer diagnosis and staging. The PET imaging shows where high metabolic rates reveal the tiniest cancers with the anatomical accuracy of the CT scan.
PET/CT can give physicians a broader view of the patient’s condition. The combination of these two technologies is vastly superior to what either one of them could do alone. The two modalities operate very differently, but together they reveal important, sometimes critical information to physicians, such as the presence of minute malignant tumors.
Johns Hopkins introduced the world to the first production PET/CT scanner in June 2001. Lakeland offered southwest Michigan’s first scans in August 2003. At the time it was one of only a handful of scanners in the country.
To schedule an imaging test please call 800.791.2810