A couple of questions regarding scans .Is it better to have a PET scan when looking for further cerebral/more brain tumours / odema post SBR .I have a pacemaker which is delaying my MRI scan .Also if looking for more cardiac tumour would a PET scan be better than an MRI scan .What are the differences which one is more accurate? Anyone know the answer to this?Thanks for any input Diane .
Hello Diane I originally had a pet scan when I had lung cancer. It showed more accuracy and activity on my chest before I was diagnosed . I believe Pet scans are more expensive than MRIs. Relating a pet scan on brain or cardiac tumours to your question, sorry i don't know.
Best wishes
Hoggy
Thanks Hoggy ,I think I shall try and talk to my lung cancer nurse on Monday to see what's going on .Have a lovely Christmas hope your feeling better now .
Hi Diane and Susieanna. I'm keeping well thank you. Got over a rotten cold and beat it without any antibiotics! I know that had I still been a smoker with that rotten cold I would have gone straight to the gp for the antibiotics. I did have a regular bad chest when I did smoke. Thank god i stopped when i did. Life is too short.
A very Merry Christmas to my friends on here old and new. Thank you for the useful information snd support I've had on This forum.
Best wishes
Hoggy
Happy Christmas and have a good new year ,Diane
All i know is that apparently PET scans light up cancers; and this is what is usually used to determine a cancer anywhere in the body; they dont like doing them cos they are expensive; though i wouldn't call a grand expensive; but when they think its cancer, i believe this is what is used ; but dont know about the brain side; i would have thought it would be used for heart; but yes, ask your lung cancer nurse. xxx and hello hedgehoggy; hope you are doing ok xx
A PET scan is not very good for looking for brain tumours as the brain takes up the tracer and shows really bright, so it would be hard to see any tumour. The heart can also take up a bit of tracer, maybe a ct with contrast would be useful?
A pet scan would not be helpful for checking for brain tumors because the whole brain absorbs the medium they inject. According to my thoracic surgeon, the whole brain lights up. But it certainly is helpful in finding malignant tumors in other parts of the body. When I was being worked up for my lung cancer prior to surgery, I had a pet scan and mri of the brain for that reason.
Hope this helps and that everything goes well for you.
I also understood the brain uses a lot of energy (glucose) just the same as cancer tumours do, hence tumours don't show up at all well in the brain. Because my scientific background allows me to understand the principles involved, I am massively impressed by the science behind PET scanning. It must "catch" cancers earlier than ever used to be the case when it was often too late.
I had a PET scan a couple of years ago and remember there was an old lady in the queue before me. For some reason, she was unable to lay flat. She slept in a chair normally. As a result, despite having already had the injection of radioactively labelled glucose, she was unable to be horizontally laid on the scanning table as was necessary. I thought it was such a sad thing that she was in that situation and how "lucky" I was by comparison.
I was shown the PET scan video later and the cancer tumour in my lungs was coloured and lit-up like Blackpool illuminations. Fortunately, it was nowhere else ... at that time. Two years later it had returned and was classed as having metastasised 😞.
Neil
So sorry to hear that your cancer has metastasized. We seem to have the same understanding about brain metabolism. Yes the brain does indeed use a lot of glucose to function.
I hope your cancer team is coming up with a new approach for you and that it is successful. This is such a nasty disease we share.
Wishing you a successful treatment plan in 2018. From across the ocean in Wisconsin, USA.
Jean
We assume that all imaging is the same but that's not the case. Different types of imaging are used for different purposes as others have said, certain conditions don't respond to some but others do. We'd not dream of doing anything other than an ultrasound for pregnancy for example. In the UK we tend to use chest x-ray as our first means of looking for lung cancer but elsewhere in Europe, CT is their first choice. PET is only available in a number of specialist centres and can be combined with CT although not all tumours light up with PET so histopathology is often used to confirm a diagnosis from any biopsy alongside any scan results. CT can be ordered for different parts of the body (i.e. thorax only, thorax/abdomen and full body) . Heart conditions tend to have other scans to check into these. PET scans are usually done if something shows up on a CT to determine what it is and as it combines CT, can be used by the clinician/surgeon to determine what treatment might be possible. Suggest you ask your nurse specialist or clinician to answer your questions for you and also write them down before calling them as it's easy to be confounded by all the explanations if they're not given in plain english unless you're already familiar with them (which most of us aren't). Good luck.
PET scan 
brain scan 
Finally got pet scan results... 😐 
Can lung cancer be diagnosed by a CT scan?
Waiting on scan results 
