Letter from the Editors

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POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET) has become the center of attraction after many years on the fringe of clinical medicine. Without a doubt, it now has achieved a pivotal position in the diagnosis and management of a wide variety of diagnostic problems, particularly in Oncology. Cancers of the lung, esophagus, and colon, as well as lymphoma, are managed using the information provided by PET. Some conditions, such as solitary pulmonary nodules, were shown very early to benefit from the use of fluoro-deoxyglucose (FDG) in determining whether a lesion is benign or malignant and especially in staging of the condition. Currently, PET is used for the purposes of staging, re-staging, and monitoring the response to therapeutic interventions in many other conditions as well.

The major role that FDG-PET now occupies, in the editors’ view, will require this issue as well as the next two in order to provide a thorough overview of this modality. In this issue, Dr Pat Zanzonico from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center presents an in depth summary of the currently available instrumentation including the newest combined PET/CT units that are progressively dominating the marketplace. Brookhaven’s Dr Joanna Fowler, in her discussion of PET radiopharmaceuticals, uses the brain as a model of how changes have evolved in seeking more and more specific agents.

It is essential in interpreting any diagnostic imaging procedure that one have a thorough knowledge of the pitfalls, artifacts, and variations associated with the radiopharmaceuticals used and the instruments employed. Drs Gary Cook and Ignac Fogelman from Great Britain are very experienced in this area and share their expertise with us. Moving on to the clinical applications, Drs Eric Rohren and Val Lowe of the Mayo Clinic bring the readership up to date in the area of pulmonary neoplasms. The other major clinical applications of PET will be reviewed in the July and October 2004 issues of Seminars in Nuclear Medicine.

It is also important to note the role of the Academy of Molecular Imaging (AMI) in helping to establish PET as a recognized clinical modality. Created originally as the Institute for Clinical PET (ICP), this organization and its founders and members have played a key role in promoting the virtues of PET. This effort began more than a decade ago when the role of PET was more of a potential than a reality. We have all benefited from the fruits of their labor. We are delighted to have Dr Ed Coleman review the past history of the Academy and provide some insight into its on-going role in this very exciting area of Nuclear Medicine.