I'm looking through you!

Today I had time to go through the CD they sent me with my scans so I put together some views of what I looked like inside before my treatment started. As you can see the mass is in the same plane as my heart only lower down.

Please view at your own risk, At the bottom of this post are PET Scan photos of my cancer.

I found a great article about how to understand the scan although with the colors it's pretty easy to understand

How to read a PET scan

Contributor

By Kim Vincent
eHow Contributing Writer

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A PET (positron emission tomography) scan is a diagnostic tool that detects soft tissues within the body and can detect maladies in them. It is different from an X-ray that shows bone structure but similar to an MRI that uses magnetic resonance to create images of the internal structures of the body. A PET scan is different from an MRI in that it illustrates cellular metabolic changes within tissue, giving early signs of disease starting or spreading. Reading a PET scan requires understanding what is normal and what is not.

Instructions

Review the anatomy of the area of the PET scan. If this is a chest scan to review lung health, use an anatomy book to locate the organs and soft tissues around the lungs. Knowing what should be there is the first step in understanding what is normal in your PET scan.

Locate abnormalities in the PET scan. Normal tissue will be various degrees of gray in the PET scan with problems showing as bright white spots. Some PET scans will inject a radioactive isotope prior to doing the scan to have "hot spots" light up--these bright areas are malignancies that absorb the isotope.

Determine the value of the bright spots found on the scan. These are measured by SUVs (Standardized Uptake Values) with a range of 0 to 15. Non-cancerous ranges are below 2, with most cancers starting at 2 or higher. This should be noted on the scan in the margins by the radiologist. If you have had more than one scan, compare the values to determine if the value is going up (bad sign) or down (good sign).

Confirm the location of the abnormality and consult with your physician regarding the implications of the problem and the next steps to take. A PET scan prevents invasive biopsies for most diagnostic means, although a biopsy would more than likely be the next step if a malady is found on your PET scan.

These are Slides of my actual scans taken on November 3rd 2009.
In this first view we are looking from the side and you can see the relative postilion of the mass. (I labeled some of the items to help orient the views)

In the colorized scans it is vary easy to pic out the cancer as it will luminescence quite well.















In the next slide we see the same area from the front view.













Finally in the last Slide here you can see why they consider this to be stage 3 as it is involved (although small at the time) both above and below the line of the diaphragm.






Some time after my 4th treatment (January 11th) I will go in to have these scans redone so we can compare how successful the treatments have been and the doctors can recommend what happens next