More PET/MR presence at this year’s RSNA

All major manufacturers of molecular imaging technologies now have PET/MR systems in their product portfolios. While Siemens is the only company to have an FDA approved, simultaneous PET/MR system on the market, a number of reports indicate that GE Healthcare is not too far behind in the research and development phase of an on-board and fully integrated PET/MR scanner, as evidence would have it at the 2013 Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual meeting still underway in Chicago until its conclusion tomorrow.

Siemens’ whole-body PET/MR system, the Biograph mMR, which was launched in 2010, is currently on exhibition at RSNA with a number of hardware and software tweaks added since its preliminary approval to make the system more conducive to clinical use, which appears to be slowly catching on. Industry experts relay that the technology is most promising for oncologic and neuroimaging applications.

“It is now installed in 50 sites worldwide,” Jan Chudzik, Siemens’ head of MR product marketing told Molecular Imaging. “In the beginning we had them set up mainly in universities and research centers. Now it is split between research and clinical settings.”

GE Healthcare’s PET/MR scanner is so new that a 510(k) application has not yet been filed. Richard Hausmann, PhD, president and CEO of GE’s global MR business could not go on record with many too many details, except that preliminary research was encouraging. This was thought to be bolstered by the fact that PET/MR as a technology has moved past feasibility studies into informative clinical and comparison studies.

“Even three hours after injection, the image quality in PET/MR is still clearer than with other methods,” Hausmann remarked. “We expect to file sometime during the first half of 2014.”

Royal Philips offers a tandem PET/MR system, The Ingenuity TF, which is able to fuse images during post-processing. The decision to go with this configuration was due to concerns that an onboard system would compromise image quality.

The cutting-edge solid state detector technology shown in new PET/CT systems this year was also reflected in PET/MR scanners, which suggests that the trend will continue to expand throughout the PET industry.