The future of looking inside of you

Until now, doctors have prescribed PET scans to diagnose the spread of life-threatening cancers within the body, because the procedure exposes patients to a high level of radiation.  Ricardo Diaz Graciani, a professor of physics at the University of Barcelona, is developing with his partner David Gascon techniques to reduce radioactive exposure. If he succeeds, doctors may be able to use PET scans to diagnose not only cancer, but common inflammatory diseases such as arthritis.

PET is short for positron emission tomography. To perform a scan, doctors inject the body with a liquid laced with radioactive material. This material releases radioactive gamma rays inside the body that machines detect. Based on these rays, they can reconstruct the way one’s organs are working, and can detect whether any are damaged.

PET scans are more useful than traditional x-rays, explains Graciani, because they “let us see motion within the body—how nutrients are absorbed,” while x-rays do not. “Think of a PET scan as a movie of things inside of you,” he continues, whereas an x-ray is more like a “snapshot.”

Doctors often need more than just a snapshot to treat a disease. PET scans could serve as a powerful tool to help doctors “diagnose” and provide “precise, targeted cures for inflammatory diseases” such as arthritis and Alzheimer's, if only PET scans did not expose people to so much radiation, asserts Graciani.

Graciani is working to speed up the electronics in the gamma-ray sensors of PET scan machines. Those machines with faster electronics will take faster, clearer pictures, he explains. They would allow for scans that produce “more precise information with much smaller doses of radiation,” making PET scanners practical for imaging inflammatory disease. Graciani predicts that we will begin to see such machines on the market in the next “five to ten years.”

The longer future prospects are even more exciting. “In fifteen to twenty years,” Graciani believes we will see “optoelectronics” in PET scanners. Optoelectronics, unlike the traditional electronics found in today’s computers, process data with photons (light) instead of electrons (electricity). They can perform computations faster than can the traditional electronics found in today’s computer and a PET scan machine built with optoelectronics would use less radiation than one with traditional electronics.

“Optoelectronics,” he explains, “is sort of like a step between quantum computing and current computing.”