A SPECT-CT will soon be available to patients of South Shore Regional Hospital.
A SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography)-CT is a form of nuclear medicine that combines the x-ray images of a traditional CT-scan with a 3D gamma radiation-camera, to give a 360-degree scan of a patient.
Dr. Chen Meng, a Radiologist at South Shore Regional Hospital, says this will result in major improvements when analyzing a patient’s medical issues and needs.
“A SPECT-CT adds the benefit of a CT-scanner to a nuclear medicine scanner. For example, this will prove to be a significant improvement in care for cancer patients waiting for their diagnosis, particularly during this pandemic era where long wait times for diagnostic imaging tests are already impacting patients. A SPECT-CT will improve efficiency, decrease CT-scan wait times by freeing up our current CT-scanner, and provide a secondary backup CT scanner for when our primary machine is down for repair (for emergency cases). It will bring South Shore Regional Hospital to the same standard of care the rest of province and country experiences.”
Meng also says the new machine is exciting news not only for residents of the South Shore but also for those who practice medicine here. “It’s exciting for the doctors who will be able to utilize this new diagnostic tool but it’s also exciting for the technologists who operate the machine.”
On the diagnostic front, Meng says the machine will give doctors more certainty. “We refer to nuclear medicine as unclear medicine because of the poor resolution compared to CT scans, so now we combine the two and have a much better idea of where and what the abnormality we are looking at is.”
The Health Services Foundation of the South Shore has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Nova Scotia Health to raise an additional $900,000 in support of the SPECT-CT scanner as part of its fundraising efforts for the South Shore Regional Hospital Redevelopment Project.
The addition of this new technology will increase the Foundation’s fundraising goal to $6.6-million.
Foundation Brighter Days Campaign Co-Chairs David Himmelman and Tim O’Regan are confident the new fundraising goal will be achievable, especially where this will be the only SPECT-CT scanner on the South Shore.
“Our early fundraising efforts for the redevelopment project are going well” says O’Regan. “The point of this project is to bring a higher level of health care efficiency to the South Shore. Our fundraising volunteers are excited to be able to bring this new technology to South Shore Regional as another way of keeping our hospital equipped with the most modern technology possible.”
Nuclear medicine is performed in nine hospitals across Nova Scotia. As of 2022, South Shore Regional Hospital is one of only two hospitals without local access to a SPECT-CT scanner in the province.
