Thousands more patients to benefit from new scanner

Another milestone has been reached in the Daisy Appeal’s campaign to bring a state-of-the-art diagnostic tool to the region’s cancer and heart centre.

Next month a contract will be signed with Siemens Healthcare for a new £1.62m PET/CT scanner on the Castle Hill Hospital site at Cottingham, which will help put the area at the forefront of advances in medical technology and help thousands more patients over the coming years.

Dubbed the “new MRI”, the combination of two scanning techniques, Positron Emission Tomography and Computed Tomography, has revolutionised many fields of medical diagnosis, helping doctors to more accurately diagnose and identify cancer, heart disease and brain disorders.

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Close links with research and development at the University of Hull will mean patients being able to benefit from new technologies as medical advances are made.

Prof Nick Stafford, who is chairman of the Daisy Appeal, said: “We had X-rays at the beginning of the last century, we then got onto ultrasound, then onto CT, and then MRI, PET/CT is the next big thing without a doubt and in many respects has more spin offs then the others because you can look at things on a molecular basis.

“Most people are just using the technology as a bog-standard investigation for cancer, whereas we want to develop ours as part of the development of new markers to look at other diseases like cardiac problems and chronic neurological problems.”

PET scans produces a three-dimensional image or picture of functional processes in the body but do not give good anatomical detail, which are needed to plan treatment. The CT scan compensates for this by using multiple x-rays.

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As well as cancer imaging, PET/CT can also be used for determining blood flow to the heart muscles and can also help in the treatment of epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases.

A highly accurate diagnostic tool, it allows more precise, personalised treatment.

The scanner is one of the first to be sold privately and patients will be paid for by the NHS, with the money creating an income for the charity which is already looking ahead to 2014/2015 when they may want to purchase a second scanner to keep up with expected demand.

Currently patients are examined in a mobile scanner, which visits the hospital on the back of a lorry, and the expectation is that a permanent facility will see a huge expansion in numbers, from around 1000 a year to 3,000 over the next four or five years.

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The development is also closely linked in with the University of Hull, which will be the home for a cyclotron, purchased by the Daisy Appeal, which produces the short-lived isotope markers, used for the PET imaging.

A second cyclotron will be based at the new centre.

“Rather than just doing something completely off the wall in the laboratory, we are doing something that is translational, which transfers from the laboratory to the bedside,” said Prof Stafford.

“We will have the ability to develop things at the University and bring them up here and use them on the patient.

People will be treated and scanned using state-of-the-art equipment and have access to new development through clinical trials or new technology that comes in associations with scans.”

The new scanner will open in April 2013.

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Prof Stafford said it couldn’t have been achieved without people’s generosity: “People have been fantastic, we have had big cheques, small cheques, people doing runs, people doing crazy things.

“The whole point of Daisy is that it has been practical developments; it’s not pie in the sky lab-based animal research - it is stuff that will really help the man on the street.”

The contract signing ceremony will take place between Siemens and the charity on Friday December 9.

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