Vancouver now home to fastest PET/CT scanner in Canada

BC Cancer has rolled out a new diagnostic tool that it says is the fastest and most advanced of its kind in Canada.

A new cancer screening machine that recently began operating at the BC Cancer Centre in Vancouver is the fastest and most advanced in Canada, according to officials.

The Quadra PET/CT scanner is the first of its kind in the country, and it can capture a much larger picture than previous generations and is about 22 times more sensitive.

“It is the equivalent of four PET scanners put together, and essentially the area covers from the head to the pelvis,” said Dr. François Bénard, senior research director at BC Cancer and radiology professor at the University of B.C. “We can image this entire area of the body in one shot, so you can do things that we could not do before.”

In a nutshell, the new scanners give better quality images in less time and requires less radioactive drugs than previous machines, he told CTV News.

A PET/CT scanner combines two imaging devices, positron emission technology, which looks at biochemistry, and computed tomography, which provides anatomical information. A PET scan requires an injection of a radioactive substance called a tracer, while a conventional CT scan does not. B.C. is home to three PET/CT machines, in Vancouver, Victoria and Kelowna.

Notably, the new Quadra machine is the fastest of its kind, which means more scans can be performed and patients get a more comfortable experience. Bénard says it can take more time to position a patient in the machine than take the picture itself.

“When I started my career, it would take two hours to take a PET scan, now we can get a better PET/CT scan in less than 30 seconds,” he said.

Bénard added that those getting a PET scan on an older machine need not worry—they are also very precise.

“If you’re not getting a PET scan on that machine you should be reassured. BC Cancer has very modern instruments at other sites,” he said.

What this new scanner will do right away is add capacity for more diagnostics and provide research opportunities in the radiopharmaceutical field at UBC, according to Bénard.

In May, the BC Cancer Centre in Vancouver also got a state-of-the-art photon-counting CT scanner.

With files from CTV News Vancouver’s Spencer Harwood