Former Winkler Resident Making Strides In Health Field

A former Winkler resident is making advances in the medical world at the University of California in Davis. Eric Berg, is part of a group of researchers working toward building the first full body Positron Emission Tomography Scanner (PET).

"The first couple of years were mainly spent on building new detectors for the scanner and some other single processing methods," said Berg whose been working on this project for roughly four and a half years. "Most recently and probably most exciting has been building a scaled down scanner for imaging monkeys. We finished this past summer and the past few months have been spent testing its performance with some animal imaging studies."

Berg went on to say they had just transferred the scaled down model to the primate research at the University. This technology will not only improve on the current clinical imaging environment, but also enable some areas of human biology to be seen with imaging for the first time. UC Davis has one of seven National Primate Research Centres in the US and the prototype scanner will be used to look at a variety of new applications enabled by total-body imaging.

A PET Scan is a scan that allows a doctor to check your body for diseases.

"It involves some radioactive decay, anti-matter, and then Einstein's famous E=mc^2 equation. After all of that you can learn something about what is happening in the body," said Berg. "It's complimentary imaging to something like a CT or CAT scan or a MRI. In those you are looking at physical changes in the body. Either due to invasive cancer, other structural abnormalities, a stroke, or things like that. With PET we inject what is called a radio-tracer and depending where that goes you can learn what is happening in the body. Not what it looks like, but the molecular process that's happening in the body."

Berg stated you can look at sugar metabolism, changes in the brain activity, cardiovascular changes and much more.

"It's mainly used in looking at aggressive metastatic cancers as those will take up sugar or glucose more than the surrounding tissues. The power of PET is that the molecular changes will usually happen before the physical changes. So you can either usually get a sense of early diagnoses or responsive therapy," explained Berg. "You can't really see physically your changes in brain function, but you can if you have the right molecule. That's the biology and physics bases of this."

Berg provided the benefits of the total-body PET scanner, which they hope to have completed in 2018.

They say it will help overcome the main limitation in current PET imaging: current scanners used for clinical imaging capture only a small amount of the signal from the radioactive particles (< 1%), ultimately leading to 'noisy' images and limits the ability to detect small cancers. By covering nearly the entire patient with detectors, our new total-body scanner will collect substantially more signal (approximately 40 fold increase). This increase could be used in a number of ways: better image quality, reduce the radiation dose and reduce the scanning time. Along with this, the total body scanner will provide a picture of what is going on throughout the whole body simultaneously, compared to only a small section at a time with current scanners.
 
Currently, there are approximately fifteen to twenty people working on various parts of this project, including Berg's group at UC Davis along with people from other research labs such as UC Berkeley and University of Pennsylvania. In 2015, following a few years of preliminary work, they received a grant for $15 million to build the system, and have formed partnership with two industry vendors to supply materials and manufacturing.

"In the beginning, when I started at the University of Manitoba for my undergrad and bachelors degree, I was always interested in physics engineering type of things. I eventually found myself near the end of my physics degree wanting to apply that kind of knowledge and experience for medical and biological type of things in hopes of finding things out or building things to help people and improve health care," said Berg. "Fortunate enough to be paired with a great mentor at the University of Manitoba Health Sciences Centre to get me on this path to Davis to keep doing what I was doing there. When I came to Davis I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. The experiences I've had in the past four and a half years have been well above and beyond what I expected."