Mayo Clinic will be the first North American provider to perform scans on patients with Siemens Healthineers’ Biograph Vision Quadra PET/CT scanner.

Recently installed at its Rochester location, the 106-centimeter-long PET/CT is capable of imaging a patient from the top of their head to their legs simultaneously, at reduced radiation exposures, and has ultrafast timing resolution that makes it the most sensitive PET/CT on the market for clinical use.

Scans with the system are scheduled to begin later this year, with Mayo Clinic expecting it to dramatically increase quality and speed of clinical PET/CT, especially for the diagnosis, staging and treatment of cancer.
"This new scanner is literally an order of magnitude more powerful than our prior best PET/CT scanners, allowing for dramatic improvements in clinical practice while also opening whole new horizons," said Dr. Geoffrey Johnson, chair of the division of nuclear medicine in the department of radiology at Mayo Clinic, in a statement.

Cleared by the FDA in March 2021, the system’s large axial field of view is four times that of Siemens’ Biograph Vision 600. It also has the same 3.2-millmeter silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) detector technology and Time of Flight (ToF) performance.

“This has the axial field of view of four Vision 600s,” John Khoury, the U.S. vice president of molecular imaging at Siemens Healthineers North America, told HCB News in 2021. “What this means is that clinicians can now observe organ-to-organ interaction.”

It also enables radiation oncology planning for larger patients and speeds up pediatric scans at potentially lower doses. Physicians in Europe, where it received CE marking in the Fall 2020, are using it to perform high-throughput imaging that cuts scans down from 20 minutes to three to five minutes.

In addition to cancer, the system is expected to improve diagnosing infections as well as inflammatory, cardiovascular and neurologic diseases.

Mayo Clinic says it will facilitate systemic imaging for detecting extremely small sites of active cancer, and accurately calculate the amount of radiopharmaceutical therapy that can be delivered to cancer sites in a personalized way for each individual.

The system also can scan patients with more than one PET radiotracer simultaneously and produce whole-body 3D maps of quantitative blood flow rates to every organ and tissue.

Mayo Clinic estimates that its use will improve imaging tenfold.

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