Functional anatomical mapping technique using independent nuclear medicine and CT acquisitions

As new methods of diagnostics are being invented every day, the limitation of every field is being complemented by another method. No field has remained exclusive in itself. A classic example is of the development of Functional Anatomical Mapping (FAM). This technique uses the functional information obtained after a Nuclear Medicine procedure and combines it with a high resolution morphological information obtained by a CT scan.The development of hybrid machines has blurred the boundaries of Nuclear Medicine and Radiodiagnosis. But these new machines are prohibitively expensive and many upcoming centers are not in a position to use these methods. As an alternative to a combined single step acquisition, we tried to map and match the data of the same patient obtained from separate CT and Nuclear Medicine studies.Having acquired the information separately, the images were manually fused to give a FAM image. This is only the first study of its kind and we hope to refine the method further to give more accurate reports. We conclude that this is a viable method, though more number of studies need to be performed before accepting it as a true alternative to single step FAM study.