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Phoebe acquires PET scanner

• Equipment often used to scan for cancer is installed at Phoebe Diagnostics Center.

Susan McCord

ALBANY — Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital has added a $2.4 million imaging device, a fixed PET/CT scanner, at the Phoebe Diagnostics Center on Meredyth Drive.

Having the device in-house, instead of using the mobile device that had been visiting the hospital weekly over the last four years, “gets patients out of a truck, and out of the hallway while they wait to be scanned,” Phoebe officials said in a statement.

“We were cramming in as many patients as we could (in that one day),” Phoebe Radiology Director Ron Fraser said.

PET, for Positron Emission Tomography, is a nuclear medicine imaging technique that creates three-dimensional images by detecting gamma rays emitted by a tracer molecule introduced into the body. It often is used in conjunction with CT, or computed tomography, which creates three-dimensional x-ray images from a series of two-dimensional images taken around a single axis of rotation.

The PET/CT scanner is “a must-have for any cancer center,” said Sam Belakhlef, assistant director of PET/CT.

Phoebe’s new PET/CT diagnostics suite, which will house the closest permanent unit of its kind from Macon to Tallahassee, will be open to patients five days a week beginning Aug. 5, officials said.

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