Meet Biograph Vision Quadra 
PET/CT experts 

The power of a proven platform. The perspective of a large axial PET field of view. Meet nuclear medicine experts who take the potential of PET/CT further with Biograph Vision Quadra™.

Network medicine is interested in the protein-protein and cellular interactions, as well as inter-organ communication and social networks and searches for new mechanistical insights to better guide therapy and organismal level and finally improve patients’ outcomes. We as nuclear medicine physicians have, in most of our examinations, a “whole person” view. In whole-body PET/CT, we are displaying molecular targets and physiology on a wholeperson level. So, we are predestined to be involved in whole-person research.

With total-body PET/CT, we are able to display the connectivity or at least the co-relation between organs and with it respective changes between healthy individuals, people with allostatic load, and people where the presence of disease was already diagnosed. This is unique and no other discipline or technology can provide this information non-invasively and serially on a wholeperson level.

First, we were inspired by the high sensitivity of those scanners and the question how we could make use of it. Providing whole-body molecular information ideally beyond 1mSv including CT, would be the basis for regular screening with PET/CT. There is already a huge amount of data on the performance of PET and PET/CT in a disease screening setting. But now we can achieve a much higher detection rate and—as described earlier—can add inter-organ relations to early detect not only disease but also allostasis.

There have been already published data on how emotional or post-traumatic stress affects outcome based on patient questionnaires. What is new is the understanding that we can use PET/CT signals from the amygdala to identify an emotional stress activation, and with total-body PET/CT, set these signals directly into relation to peripheral organ metabolism or diseases. In Vienna, we have built the whole translational pipeline from human total-body research back to animals and cells, so that we can understand metabolic signals of single organs better and, with it, understand the changes of signals. In cancer patients, you can even add the analysis of cancer genetics, tumor microenvironment, and inflammatory changes by adding molecular biology analyzing techniques. We could demonstrate how stress in lung cancer patients affects a systemic inflammatory response and, with it, the tumor microenvironment and how this changes survival rates.

The idea is to detect stress activation and downstream allostatic changes early, before disease occurs. After early detection, you can add primary prevention and observe the return of the organism in a balanced homeostatic setting. An image says more than thousand words, so that we hope that individuals can be better guided for prevention like weight loss, anti-stress training, and changes in behaviors. Of course, we are also thinking about medical strategies to resolve the metabolic dissociation driving disease development.