Various Imaging Technologies Used For Mesothelioma

by Terro White

Mesothelioma is one of the harder diseases to diagnose. This is because most of the symptoms are very common including shortness of breath, palpitations of the heart, persistent coughing and breathing difficulties, swallowing difficulties and some chest pain. Many doctors fail to recognize these symptoms unless they are explicitly told that the individual has been exposed to asbestos.


There are some imaging technologies too which can help doctors to diagnose malignant mesothelioma as it would do a patient a world of good if the problem is detected in its early stages than later when there is not available treatment.

Positron Emission Tomography

This is turning out to be quite a favorite with the physicians as more and more doctors prefer to use this to help them diagnose mesothelioma. The PET scan uses tiny particles emitted by radioactive substances called positrons to detect the cancer or the growing tumor. Radioactive therapies are one of the more common methods for mesothelioma partially because they don't have side effects and also because they are not as painful as a surgery or chemotherapy can prove to be for the patients.

Hence as far as latent asbestos cancer is concerned PET scan is developing into a very efficient tool for imaging scans. The way PET scans helps is that it detects areas where there is abnormal metabolic activity like excess glucose consumption which is often the case with malignant tumors. It does so by creating a 3D image map of the biochemical processes within the body thus spotting functional aberrations internally. For this disease, more than diagnosis this imaging is used for checking the distant metastases and helping out in chalking a treatment program.

X-Ray Imaging

They are low cost and highly popular which is why they are so commonly used. They are safe which is why they are used to identify internal problems in the body. They have resolution to spot something like a pleural effusion or a malignancy or tumor in the lungs. However, the resolution of X-rays is not sufficient to distinguish between pleural tissues as x-rays do not have resolution to properly image pleural surfaces. They can be used to identify a lung malignancy through chest x-rays or peritoneal malignancy through abdominal x-rays. However, X-rays use ionizing radiation which could have an adverse effect on the internal tissue. Hence one should take sufficient precautions to ensure that the tissue of the area studied is not damaged in any way.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

This is highly successful in areas where x-rays fail during the diagnosis and staging of malignant mesothelioma. They use powerful magnetic fields to image the interior structures of the body and hence capable of spotting soft tissue structures that can help diagnose the issue. Surgical therapy which is curative uses MRI to find out till what extent the damage has spread to tissues around and use that information to finalize the surgical strategies. This is better than CT technology too as the soft tissue study might not be conclusive through CT.

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