Patient Preparation

Abstract

PET is a logistically complicated diagnostic technique. Given the desire for optimal cost-effectiveness, it places high demands on medical and technical personnel in terms of planning and performing a diagnostic scan. The complexity of a particular clinical problem, when viewed from the same perspective, also requires that the diagnostician performing the examination have extensive experience in the area of indications as well as sound clinical and technical knowledge of the method. Given the conditions that are technically feasible today, the need to adjust the patient or the scan in a particular case to the conditions that are technically possible is in many cases unavoidable — more than would otherwise be desirable (consider, for example, the factor of external nuclide supply). However, this is done solely to ensure that it will be possible to obtain physiological information from the measured data in as comprehensive and accurate a manner as possible.