Europe’s first mobile Biograph™ PET/CT Scanner

InHealth provided The Royal Marsden in Chelsea with an interim mobile PET/CT solution while the hospital upgraded its own scanner in June. A longstanding partner to the NHS, providing services from over 800 locations to 4 million patients each year, InHealth has over 17 years’ experience delivering PET/CT solutions.

The partnership with The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust utilised the latest Siemens technology in PET/CT scanning; the first of its kind on a Mobile anywhere in Europe.

The new state-of-the-art trailer has been specifically designed and built by Lamboo to accommodate a Siemens Biograph mCT Flow scanner, three patient uptake bays along with an on-board hot-lab and control room for use by up to three radiographers.

The scanner uses FlowMotion™ technology which combines Siemens Healthineers standard-setting PET/CT with a unique system design to enable the continuous motion of the patient table, which returns increased image quality, greater patient comfort, and shorter scanning times. Clinicians have the option to combine standardised protocols and personalised scans in a single exam and have access to the 128 slice CT component. Increased reproducibility and higher image quality improve lesion detectability while reducing unnecessary exposure to radiation. Patients meanwhile benefit from greater comfort during their scan and a shorter examination time.

Professor Wim Oyen, Consultant in Nuclear Medicine, The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and Professor of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, The Institute of Cancer Research, London, said: “We wanted to ensure that our PET/CT service continued without disruption while our own scanner was being upgraded. The InHealth team worked seamlessly with my team at The Royal Marsden and provided our patients and my team with a highly efficient service, delivered from the most comfortable environment imaginable on a mobile. The images were of the highest quality and the scanner speed meant that we could easily scan up to 15 patients per day without even approaching the scanner’s maximum capacity.”

Mark Gleeson, PET/CT Business Director, InHealth said: “PET/CT is one of the ‘go-to’ diagnostic imaging methods relied on by patients and Consultants of The Royal Marsden, and the team there perform a high number of scans each day. I am delighted that the InHealth mobile clinical team rose to this challenge and the investment that we have made to have the latest state-of-the-art scanner in our mobile PET/CT fleet, has meant that we are able to scan more patients, with an average scan time of only twelve minutes, without any compromise on quality, in the best possible mobile environment, than we have ever been able to before.”