Tomografia con acquisizione simultanea RM – PET

Risonanza magnetica che integra un sistema a emissione di positroni

Siemens Healthineers

The quest for the ability to look into, and examine, every tissue in our bodies is probably as old as medicine itself. With their detailed images of the entire skeleton, radiography and X-ray tomography offered a partial response to this need. Today, the combination of different diagnostic tools such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Positron-Emission Tomography (PET) provide us with high-definition images of every organ in our bodies, including muscles and other tissues, together with information on their metabolic activity. Both these techniques work using induced physical processes on the body’s atoms – MRI through external magnetic fields, PET with the injection of radioactive substances. Again, no human contribution is necessary to generate the final image, which is built up by a software able to “translate” the nuclear signals produced by the body. The considerable quantity of complex information contained in the data produced by these techniques is partially rendered by colour coding in the final image.