43
Helping find cancer
Salem Community Hospital has Dual-128 CT scanner
SALEM
Radiologist Dr. Peter L. Apicella can see right through you.
You’ll be glad he did.
He’s the president of Salem Radiologists Inc., the chairman of medical imaging and a past chief of staff at Salem Community Hospital.
Imaging is not new, but it is growing.
Early scanner technology took 20 minutes and the patient had to be moved several times.
The hospital recently became one of the facilities in this area with a Dual-128 CT, which stands for computed tomography, which in one quarter of a second can capture an image of a beating heart.
The doctor showed an image of a woman’s breast that looked like an X-ray. There was nothing apparently wrong, until Dr. Apicella greatly enlarged the image. Tiny white dots appeared that he said were cancerous.
With older technology, the woman would have to wait another year for another mammogram.
“We caught it a whole year early,” Dr. Apicella said.
The computed tomography, he added, “helps me find the cancer.”
The cancer can be attacked with the proper drugs precisely delivered with the aid of computers.
Dr. Apicella said reviews 30 to 40 cases each day.
Statistics show that the lifetime risk in the United States of a woman developing breast cancer is one out of eight.
Monthly self-examinations are urged. But Dr. Apicella said that with mammogram screening, cancer can be detected two years before it is felt. He said mammogram screening can also reduce breast-cancer deaths by 36 percent to 44 percent for women in their 40s.
The hospital in the last year diagnosed more than 120 breast-cancer patients with the new technology, with 80 percent at an early stage and an expected cure.
The doctor is also involved with three-dimensional imaging that requires massive amounts of imaging storage — some 75 terabytes.
“That’s the next thing above gigabites,” he said.
The new process can allow a three-dimensional and noninvasive colonoscopy, or reveal the extent of someone’s injuries.
The technology has cost about $2 million.
Tina Creighton, a spokeswoman for the Humility of Mary Health Partners, said it has had the technology for several years.
Trish Hrina, a spokeswoman for Forum Health Northside Medical Center, said the center did not have that type of scanner.