syngo® TimCT Oncology* – a combined hardware and software solution – enables patients to be scanned in one step, from head to toe, thanks to its Continuous Table move. The technique is easily applicable and effective for local tumor and cancer staging, amongst others. At the University Hospital Freiburg, investigations have highlighted the high diagnostic accuracy of the procedure, which the department has been using since the end of 2005 for whole-body staging of rectal cancer, gynecologic malignancies, prostate cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST), plasmocytoma, lymphomas, and for diagnostic work-up of patients with Crohn’s disease.

In an MRI-exam with syngo TimCT Oncology, the patient slowly slides through the magnet tunnel on a continuously moving table. The system’s software, online reconstruction, and technical refinements help to minimize artifacts. Additionally, syngo TimCT Oncology delivers not only striking image quality, but also workflow benefits through time-savings: Patient repositioning and stepwise examination for whole body coverage are completely omitted.

The University Hospital in Freiburg changed the handling and workflow of patients with rectal cancer with syngo TimCT Oncology as their data concerning abdominal tumor staging was so encouraging. [1, 2]. In a next step their investigations focused on extending the procedure to the lungs in order to obtain a real one-stop-shop imaging for tumor patients. For pulmonary nodule detection the free-breathing TIRM sequence from the sliding multi-slice protocol was compared to multi-slice computed tomography as the reference standard. The study identified a total of 321 nodules. On a per-patient basis the sensitivity and specificity for pulmonary nodule detection were 81.8 percent and 94.7 percent, respectively. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis revealed high values of specificity ranging between 91.6 percent and 99.1 percent with average mean sensitivities above 90.2 percent for lesions larger than three millimeters in diameter and accuracies over 94.5 percent. Noteworthy, the technique can be utilized almost independently of patient compliance. All clinically relevant lung lesions are distinguishable and thus can be monitored during follow-up.