Imaging

Software that reads scans alongside radiologists, catching cancers earlier and predicting who is at risk.

Aidoc CARE is one radiology foundation model, pretrained on CT scans without labels, whose task-specific heads have each been FDA-cleared to flag urgent findings in emergency scans so radiologists read those first. Its oncology relevance is indirect, catching incidental masses; the regulatory evidence covers triage, not diagnostic accuracy for tumours.

A radiotherapy machine with PET detectors built in: the tumour's own radioactive tracer signal tells the beam where to fire, hundreds of times a second, so moving tumours and several metastases can be tracked and treated without external markers.

A girl who had radiotherapy to the chest carries a risk of breast cancer by age 50 of about 30 per cent. It is not only about dose: a low dose to the whole lung gave a higher standardised incidence than a high dose to a smaller field, because volume matters. Surveillance is recommended from early adulthood, decades before ordinary screening starts.

Breast MRI is the most sensitive breast scan, done lying face down with the breasts in a special coil. Abbreviated protocols cut the scan from half an hour to a few minutes, which makes MRI screening of women with dense breasts or high risk affordable.

CAIX PET is a scan using an antibody against a protein almost unique to clear-cell kidney cancer, to tell cancer from benign kidney lumps without a biopsy.

Devices that look beneath the skin surface without cutting: one scans cells with a laser at microscope resolution, another builds a cross-section with infrared light. Both help decide whether a suspicious mole or patch needs a biopsy, and which edge to cut to.

A mammogram taken after an iodine contrast injection, at two X-ray energies, so that a tumour's blood supply shows up as a bright spot. It gives much of what breast MRI gives on a machine most breast units already own.

A CT scan is a fast 3D X-ray that shows the size and shape of tumours and whether they have spread.

The staging CT scan every cancer patient already has can be measured for muscle and fat at the level of the third lumbar vertebra; low muscle predicts chemotherapy toxicity and shorter survival across cancers, and software now does the measuring automatically.

A model pretrained on 148,000 CT scans to segment organs and triage findings.

The scanners that find and stage cancer are built by five companies in a dozen factories. Detectors, superconducting magnets and the helium that cools them are the parts that run short.

Proton-rich isotopes for PET scans and some therapies are made by hitting a target with a beam from a cyclotron. Fluorine-18 is made every morning within driving distance of the scanner; gallium-68 comes from either a generator or a cyclotron; copper-64 and zirconium-89 last long enough to ship across a country.

CT scanned at two X-ray energies at once, so the scanner can tell iodine contrast from calcium and soft tissue, show exactly how much a tumour enhances, and remove the contrast digitally to save a second scan.

Two upgrades to the ordinary ultrasound machine: elastography measures how stiff a lump is (cancers are usually hard), and microbubble contrast shows how blood flows through it in real time, with no radiation and no kidney-toxic dye.

Endoscopes with an ultrasound probe on the tip, passed down the gullet or windpipe, that see through the wall of the gut or airway to stage tumours and guide a needle into lymph nodes and the pancreas without an operation.

FAPI PET is a PET scan that lights up the scaffolding around almost any solid tumour, including cancers the standard sugar scan misses.

FDG PET is the standard PET scan. A radioactive sugar shows which tissues are burning glucose fast, which most cancers do.

A PET scan using a radioactive form of oestrogen that lights up every tumour deposit still carrying the oestrogen receptor, so doctors can see whether metastases across the body will respond to hormone treatment without biopsying each one.

Injecting a dye that makes tumour glow so the surgeon can see exactly where to cut.

Ultrasound probes the size of a phone that plug into a tablet, costing a few thousand pounds rather than tens of thousands, so a clinic nurse or district doctor can check a breast lump, a swollen neck node or a liver without sending the patient to a city hospital.

HER2 PET is a PET scan using radiolabelled trastuzumab or smaller HER2 binders to map HER2 across all metastases at once.

Independent radiologists who re-read every scan in a trial the same way, so response rates mean the same thing across hospitals.

PET scans built from radiolabelled antibodies or their fragments, to see any protein an antibody can reach, including immune cells inside tumours.

The scanners built into or beside the radiotherapy machine that photograph the patient seconds before the beam fires, so the tumour is where the plan expects and, on the newest machines, so the plan can be redrawn to that day's anatomy.

Cameras in the operating theatre that see dyes the surgeon's eye cannot: green dye lighting up lymph nodes and blood supply, pink glow marking a brain tumour, and even the faint light from a PET tracer in a removed specimen. They turn the dyes into a picture the surgeon follows.

Scanners built into or next to the operating theatre, so the surgeon can check during a brain tumour or spine operation how much tumour is left and remove more before closing.

A yearly low-radiation CT scan for current and former heavy smokers that finds lung cancer early enough to cure it.

Low-dose breast X-ray used for screening. Newer 3D versions find more cancers with fewer false alarms.

The particle accelerators and shielded robotic chemistry boxes that make PET tracers in hospital basements and commercial pharmacies.

Adaptations of Meta's Segment Anything model that outline tumours and organs on any scan with a click.

Merlin is a model trained on 15,000 CT scans with their reports that can find and describe hundreds of findings.

A noradrenaline look-alike that neuroblastoma cells swallow: labelled with a small amount of radioactivity it shows the tumour on a scan; with a large amount it treats it.

MRI uses a strong magnet and radio waves, with no ionising radiation, to picture soft tissue in finer contrast than CT, so it is the standard scan for brain tumours, prostate, rectal cancer staging, liver lesions and breast screening in high-risk women. It is slow, expensive and blurred by movement.

MRI scanners are sold by the strength of their magnet. 1.5 tesla is the reliable workhorse, 3 tesla gives more signal for prostate, brain and breast imaging, and 7 tesla is a research-grade brain scanner; stronger is not simply better, because artefacts, heating and implant restrictions grow with the field.

Multiparametric prostate MRI combines three scan sequences, scored 1 to 5 under PI-RADS, and is done before a first biopsy in men with a raised PSA. Needles go to suspicious areas and men with a negative scan can often avoid biopsy altogether, but about one in ten clinically significant cancers is missed.

England's lung screening programme: people aged 55 to 74 who have ever smoked are invited for a risk assessment and, if high risk, a low-dose CT scan, often in a mobile unit in a supermarket car park.

Nuclear medicine hardware means the scanners themselves: PET/CT, SPECT/CT, and new total-body PET that images the whole body at once.

Dyes that glow under special light, so surgeons can see tumour edges and nerves in the operating theatre.

A PET tracer that measures how much of the DNA repair enzyme PARP a tumour has, to predict response to PARP inhibitors.

A scan that shows where a radioactive tracer accumulates, so it images what tumours are doing rather than what they look like.

Making PSMA, FDG, and new tracers under drug-manufacturing rules and delivering them daily.

Scan after two cycles of chemotherapy; if the tumour has gone dark, give less treatment, and if not, give more. Hodgkin lymphoma pioneered this.

PET and CT in one machine, so hot spots on the PET are pinned to exact locations on the CT.

PET combined with MRI instead of CT, giving biology plus the best soft-tissue detail, at lower radiation dose.

A new kind of CT detector that counts every X-ray photon and records its energy, giving sharper pictures at lower dose and colour-like tissue information from every scan.

Whether men should be screened for prostate cancer is still debated; the modern approach uses a PSA blood test followed by an MRI scan, which finds the cancers that matter while leaving harmless ones alone.

A prostate-cancer-specific PET scan that finds spread far earlier than CT or bone scan, and tells you whether a matched radioactive drug will work.

The numbers pulled from scans that decide whether a cancer is shrinking, growing or dead: tumour diameters for RECIST, sugar uptake on PET, water movement on MRI; they run every trial and most clinic decisions, and they are only as good as the way the scan was taken.

Brighter, longer-lasting fluorescent particles and targeted microbubbles that make tumours visible during surgery or on an ultrasound scan.

An open generalist model that answers questions about 2D and 3D scans.

Measuring, from scans taken after each dose, how much radiation a radioligand actually delivers to the tumour and to kidneys and marrow, so treatment can be personalised.

Turning ordinary CT, MRI and PET scans into hundreds of measured features of shape and texture that computers relate to tumour biology and outcome.

The factories and courier routes that make and deliver short-lived radioactive tracers to hospitals within hours.

A PET scan using a radioactive hormone mimic that lights up neuroendocrine tumours and shows whether the matching radioactive treatment will work.

SPECT and the bone scan are an older type of nuclear scan, still used for bone metastases and to check where a radioactive drug went after treatment.

A gamma camera with a CT scanner bolted on, so a hot spot on a bone scan or a sentinel-node scan is pinned to the exact bone or lymph node, and the dose from a radioactive drug can be measured after treatment.

An ordinary heart ultrasound analysed by software that tracks how far each segment of heart muscle shortens with every beat; a fall of more than about fifteen per cent from baseline warns of chemotherapy heart damage months before the usual ejection fraction measurement moves.

Scanners sensitive enough to image the whole body in seconds at a fraction of the radiation dose, which raises the question of whether healthy people should be scanned at all.

An experimental PET scan that shows whether a tumour carries the TROP2 protein, so doctors could pick the right ADC before giving it.

Ultrasound uses sound waves to make live pictures; it is cheap, safe, and used to guide needles into lumps.

Whole-body MRI is an MRI of the entire body without radiation, used to find spread in myeloma and to screen people with high inherited cancer risk.

The plain X-ray is the oldest and cheapest medical image: a single shadow picture of bone and lung. Fluoroscopy is the live-video version, used to steer needles, catheters and stents during cancer procedures.