The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Royal Philips Electronics' whole body positron emission tomography/magnetic resonance (PET/MR) imaging system - the Ingenuity TF PET/MR.
The system utilizes the company’s proprietary Time-of-Flight (TOF) technology – Astonish TF – designed for PET scanners to enhance image quality by reducing noise and providing increased sensitivity.
The system is designed in such a way that the patient table rotates between each modality to scan a patient, thus enabling the system to perform both standalone MR and hybrid PET/MR studies.
It is combined with the superior soft-tissue contrast of 3T MR to image disease as it proliferates in soft tissue.
The company said clinical cases have already shown the advantages of being able to superimpose PET over MR images to help detect abnormalities in various organs.
Mount Sinai School of Medicine Translational and Molecular Imaging Institute director and radiology and medicine (cardiology) professor Zahi Fayad said the PET/MR system will be useful to practitioners because of the highly anatomical and contrast images that can be acquired when you combine functional MR images with the metabolic information acquired by PET.