June startup expected as PET/CT scanner arrives at Windsor Regional site

Windsor patients will no longer have to hit the highway for PET and CT scans.

Just over one year after Windsor Regional Hospital announced it would receive a state-of-the-art PET/CT scanner, a truck delivered the $3.5-million machine to the hospital’s Metropolitan campus Saturday morning, outside the Windsor Regional Cancer Centre. It was scheduled to arrive Friday, but customs issues at the Detroit-Windsor border held it back. A white trailer contains the diagnostic imaging equipment, which provides images of anatomy and cell function. The trailer also holds a hot lab where medical staff handle the radioactive material needed for PET scans.

The whole unit weighs 68,000 pounds and will stay parked on a concrete slab by the hospital’s healing garden. It took five hours and the help of a machinery moving company to inch the trailer in place alongside the hospital’s exterior wall.

“It’s basically what they call plug and play, where literally they will plug it into a new outlet on the wall and start it up,” said hospital spokesman Steve Erwin. “We still need several weeks to train staff on it and do our safety checks.” To get from inside the hospital to the trailer, patients will have to travel through a lighted and heated canvas-covered walkway, similar to the tunnels used to get passengers on and off commercial airplanes. That walkway can be constructed now that the trailer is in place, Erwin said.

The positron emission tomography (PET)/CT scanner will serve an estimated 600 patients per year. Patients currently have to travel to London and Toronto for PET scans since Windsor’s only PET/ CT scanner, privately owned, stopped working reliably more than a year ago.

A PET scanner is regarded as an essential tool in making the best treatment decisions for cancer patients.

While MRIs and CTs detect anatomical and structural changes in the body, a PET scanner finds chemical and physiological changes to identify and locate cancer at an earlier stage. A radioactive tracer is attached to a molecule designed to find a specific disease. It is injected into the patient and seeks out and accumulates on the cells of the targeted disease. The PET machine makes a 3-D image of the precise location.

The province and Cancer Care Ontario fully funded the new $3.5-million machine and trailer unit.

Erwin expects the scanner will be ready to use on patients by the first week of June.

It’s basically what they call plug and play, where literally they will plug it into a new outlet on the wall and start it up. We still need several weeks to train staff on it and do our safety checks.