The Cancer Centre for the North will not house a piece of diagnostic equipment now considered the industry standard in the United States when it opens late next year, BC Cancer Agency (BCCA) officials confirmed Tuesday.
However, they also say the province's two positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) scanners in Vancouver should be enough to meet the needs of northern B.C. patients.
"Every year in British Columbia there are about 22,000 new cases of cancer diagnoses but it's really a small proportion of those patients where the use of the PET-CT scan has an important role in how their cancer management proceeds," Dr. Don Wilson, the medical director of the functional imaging department at the BCCA in
Vancouver said.
About 200 patients living in northern B.C. require the scan, officials said. Roughly 2,000 northern B.C. residents are diagnosed with cancer each year.
The two PET-CTs can perform a total of 6,200 scans a year but rely on a type of radioactive material, called fluorine-18, that has a half-life of only 110 minutes, Wilson said.
A tiny amount of the material is injected into the patient and then "traced" with the machine.
"The product has to be manufactured and basically delivered to the PET-CT scanner in fairly short order and there are logistics associated with doing that," Wilson said.
Flying the material to Prince George is possible, he said, but problematic because of the special transportation requirements to make sure no one is exposed to the dangerous substance and to ensure it does not get contaminated.
"What you'd have to do is start out by making a really big batch...but you wouldn't be able to scan [as many patients for a given quantity] as here in Vancouver because we're right next to the cyclotron," Wilson said.
"We can put through 15 patients on one PET-CT scanner every day. If we were flying tracer to Prince George we would be looking at doing much fewer than that, probably less than half that capacity."
Dr. Larry Breckon, the head of the medical imaging department at the University Hospital of Northern B.C. (UNHBC), has raised concerns about a lack of a PET-CT at the Cancer Centre for the North, saying it's a vital piece of equipment.
A $15-million facility that houses a 22-tonne cyclotron capable of making the material for as many as six PET-CT scanners began operating in Vancouver in summer 2010.
It's also home to two scanners, each costing $2.5 million to purchase and install and costing about $1.5 million a year to operate.
Breckon told the Citizen that he learned through a source in July that the BCCA put out four requests for proposals (RFPs) to vendors Phillips and Siemens to make purchases of their PET-CT scanners.
He said those units were for existing cancer clinics in Surrey, Abbotsford, Victoria and Kelowna, but not Prince George.However, Provincial Health Services Authority senior public affairs officer Lubna Ekramoddoullah said "that's completely false."
"We have not put out any RFPs for expanding the PET-CT program," she said. "We are, however, working with the Ministry of Health to discuss the needs of the province as a whole over the last couple of years but nothing has been approved yet."
The Cancer Centre for the North will house facilities to provide radiation therapy which is significant in and of itself, said the centre's director of clinical operations for systemic therapy, LaDonna Fehr, because it means a patient does not have to travel as far during the five to eight weeks treatment usually requires and more quickly get help if there are side effects.
"Many of their side effects occur well after treatment has been given," Fehr said.
