Ascension St. John, in Tulsa, has unveiled the first fully digital mobile PET/CT scanner in Tulsa, Oklahoma, providing its patients with access to faster scans and better image quality.

The healthcare provider, which has been without a PET/CT scanner since 2017, will use its GE HealthCare Omni Legend aboard AMST/SMIT Kentucky trailers to perform oncology scans and some neurology brain assessments in patients with Alzheimer’s and possibly Parkinson’s disease in the future.

The scanner’s camera is the most advanced on the market, able to detect lesions as small as four millimeters, and reduces scan time to 10 minutes or less.
“This scanner will perform everything we were able to in the past, but this model can detect smaller lesions that our old system was not able to,” Liz Stamile, a nuclear medicine technologist with Ascension St. John, told HCB News.

It also is equipped with lighting and patterns on the actual scanner to ease patient anxiety during scans.

Omni Legend was introduced in 2022 and has two times the sensitivity of prior digital scanners, allowing it to image high-count tracers for cardiac and neuroimaging and produce faster total scan times, with a greater ability to identify small lesions. It comes with the Precision DL solution for deep learning image processing; an AI-based auto-positioning camera; Q.Clear for quantitative PET image reconstruction; and MotionFree, a deviceless respiratory motion correction solution.

Mobile PET/CT services will be available starting on January 15 at satellite hospitals Ascension St. John's Broken Arrow and Owasso hospitals. Two more locations will be added in 2024. The mobile unit will visit each location every two weeks.

Ascension St. John is part of Ascension Health, one of the largest private healthcare providers in the U.S. Based in Missouri, it is made up of approximately 134,000 associates, 35,000 affiliated providers, and 140 hospitals in 19 states and the District of Columbia.

Just last month, Oklahoma experienced another first in the state with the installation of Siemens Healthineers' MAGNETOM Terra 7 Tesla MR scanner at OU Health in Oklahoma City.

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