Hi, to find out where cancer cells are located, doctors injects you radioactive dye which is made of sugar. Cancer cells love sugar and they process it much more than normal cells. Thats why they are visible on PET scan. But what makes processing sugar visible on PET scan?
If you take a look on PET scan images, some organs are always visible like a brain. How do doctors distinquish what is cancer on brain and what is brain itself?
Thank you.
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The P in PET scan stands for positron. That’s an anti electron, so it has the same mass and a positive charge rather than a negative one.
The sugar is radioactive because it’s emitting those positrons. The cancer eats up that sugar, and when the radioactive atoms decay, they shoot out the positrons. The detector is looking for these positrons, and since there are very few positrons coming from anywhere but the sugar, anywhere we see lots of positrons coming from must be where the tumor is.
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