Positron emission tomography (PET) is an advanced medical imaging examination that provides detailed information on the function of an organ or system in your body. PET scans are commonly used to evaluate and diagnose cancers, neurological (brain) disorders, and cardiovascular (heart) diseases.
During a PET scan, a radioactive tracer is injected into the bloodstream and images of your body are recorded using a PET scanner. The camera records the emissions of the injected radioactive tracer, and a computer then creates multi-dimensional images of the part of your body. The injected radiotracers usually gather in diseased tissues more than in healthy tissues, thus highlighting them in the scan. Most PET scanners are combined with computerised tomography (CT) scans. This further allows the structural information provided by the CT images to be combined with the PET’s functional information.