SPECT CT Scanner
Our Children's Champions helped to fund our state-of-the-art SPECT CT Scanner. Launched in January 2019, in its first year of use 549 patients had scans on this life-changing piece of equipment!
Children's Champions have funded a SPECT CT Scanner
In 2017 thanks to your donations we have fully funded a new state-of-the-art SPECT CT Scanner for £800,000. This scanner incorporates nuclear medicine gamma scanning (SPECT) with an inbuilt CT scanning function, which sounds very technical! Simply, it means radiologists can receive more information in one scan and tailor treatment straightaway. For those children with cancer, it means they may be able to avoid unnecessary therapies that can leave them feeling very unwell.
Your donations change lives like Alice's
Around the same time as this scanner was funded, doctors found a mass in two-year-old Alice’s abdomen and her parents received the devastating news that Alice had high-risk neuroblastoma, an aggressive form of cancer. In the weeks after Alice's diagnosis, SPECT CT played a crucial role in her treatment. The scanner's ability to fuse CT and Nuclear Medicine images together immediately enabled her clinicians to locate the cancer more accurately within her body. After 18 months of treatment, Alice has now entered remission. Dad Jamie said: "Having this equipment at Sheffield Children’s has played an important part in my daughter’s treatment and the decisions made by the team looking after her, which may ultimately have saved her young life. So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you."
