Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Definition
By Mayo Clinic staff
A PET scan (positron emission tomography) is an imaging test that can help reveal how your tissues and organs are functioning. To show this chemical activity, a small amount of radioactive material must enter your body.
The precise type of radioactive material, and its delivery method, depends on which organ or tissue is being studied by the PET scan. The radioactive material may be injected into a vein, inhaled or swallowed.
More radioactive material accumulates in areas that have higher levels of chemical activity. This often corresponds to areas of disease and shows up as brighter spots on the PET scan. A PET scan is useful in evaluating a variety of conditions — including neurological problems, heart disease and cancer.
- Positron emission tomography - Computed tomography (PET/CT). Radiological Society of North America. http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=PET. Accessed Feb. 24, 2009.
- What is PET? Society of Nuclear Medicine. http://interactive.snm.org/index.cfm?PageID=972. Accessed Feb. 24, 2009.
