Diagnostic Radiology

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Tuesday, July 8, 1997

Capital Gets Country's First Medical Cyclotron

JERUSALEM (July 8) - The country's first medical cyclotron - a $2 million barrel-shaped particle accelerator that would fit into a medium-sized bedroom - has been installed at Hadassah-University Hospital in Jerusalem's Ein Kerem. There are only 100 cyclotrons like it in medical centers around the world - 20 of them in the US.

The device uses electromagnets to change atoms of oxygen or nitrogen and molecules of glucose into short-lived isotopes; these are injected into the patient, attaching themselves to fats, amino acids, sugars, oxygen, or water in the body, and emit radiation picked up by the hospital's two-year-old PET (positron emission tomography) scanner.

With a short half-life, the isotopes decay harmlessly after the scan, allowing additional scans to be performed on the same patient over and over without any harm from radiation.

"This is a momentous day for us," declared Hadassah Medical Organization director-general Prof. Shmuel Penchas.

Longer-lasting isotopes have until now been flown in from abroad or produced in the Nahal Sorek Medical Research Center, but since some, such as oxygen, are potent for only a few minutes, they have to be produced adjacent to the PET.

Prof. Roland Chisin, Dr. Eyal Mishani, and others in the medical biophysics and nuclear medicine department explained that the cyclotron was installed underground, linked to the PET by a pneumatic tube that whooshes the isotope to the scanner.

It is now being "run in" mostly doing research on neurological and cardiological functioning, but it has potential for the treatment of cancers: the PET can differentiate between scar tissue and cancerous cells by monitoring glucose consumption and blood flow and identify secondary cancers that have split off from a primary one.It can also determine whether a patient's spinal cord is functioning normally without waking him up during surgery.

Hadassah will sell glucose isotopes to other hospitals, and patients who need the sophisticated PET scanner are eventually to be referred to Hadassah.