Recent studies have found the efficiency of PET/CT Imaging in diagnosing dangerous blood clots of the human body.

Blood clots are usually an excellent thing for our body. It helps to prevent excess bleeding. However, sometimes, these blood clotting can also be hazardous to human health. It can become life-threatening for a few people too. Doctors often refer to them as emboli.

Blood clots inside our blood vessels are the harmful blood clots. It will increase your blood pressure as well as can also break free from the vein walls and travel to different body parts. It, then end up restricting the blood flow in different parts of our body. This type of blood clots is known as Venus Thromboembolism or VTE in medical language.

There are two types of blood clots:

• Deep vein thrombosis (DVT): Blood clotting in deep vein known as Deep vein thrombosis. It typically happens in legs. However, it can also occur in the arms or other places of our body.
• Pulmonary emboli (PE): Pulmonary emboli clots are blood clotting that breaks free and travels to a lung frequently. It can partially or entirely block the blood flow to the lung.

Detection and Diagnosing with computed tomography

CT scan or computed tomography scan is a great way to detect these kinds of dangerous blood clots in our body. There are different types of CT scans. The CT venography allows doctors to have a clear image of veins, especially the veins in the legs. CT Pulmonary angiography helps to provide images of our pulmonary arteries.

However, CT scans have their limitations while diagnosing blood clots. Ct scans cannot effectively diagnose the part below our knees. These tests also cannot differentiate the older and stable clotting from the newer. These limitations often lead to wrong or unnecessary treatment. CT venography and CT pulmonary angiographies are better diagnostic tools. However, this also has the one problem of not being able to differentiate the old blood clots from the newer.

Positron emission tomography is, however, a better option while diagnosing blood clots. These kinds of scan use different radioactive tracers. Doctors use these tracers depending on what they want to image. Researchers have found that the 18F-GP1 can also detect the difference between older blood clotting and the newbies, which are seemingly unstable. These radioactive traces can also help the docs with the lower leg imaging that other type of scans cannot do.

New Tracers shows promises for effective Diagnosing of VTE

A few of further studies have shown that that new tracers with PET or CT scan both to help doctors in detecting VTE.

This research had ten patients with DVT and ten patients with PE as subjects. At first, these researchers started with Ultrasound and then Ct venography and other diagnosing activities. The result has shown PE in five of the DVT patients and has recognized DVT in Seven PE patients.

So, we can tell that PET/CT scan is an ever-great way to diagnose dangerous blood clots. Check out our Radiology Center at Harding in Morristown, New Jersey.