With a “niche technology to save lives,” advanced visualization vendor TeraRecon jumped into the nuclear medicine realm this week with the introduction of the MGC500 handheld mini gamma camera for intra-operative and pre-surgical lymphoscintigraphy. It seeks to localize sentinel lymph nodes with a resolution two to three times that of a standard gamma camera, the company said. The presence or absence of regional lymph node involvement often determines the staging and treatment of many malignant tumors, namely for applications in breast and skin cancers as well as parathyroid or thyroid cancer. It also has applications in renal and pancreatic transplantation.

The three-pound camera, which came from the company’s purchase of AcroRad of Japan, is based on Cadmium Telluride detector technology that provides near real-time imaging with sharp detail. The camera achieves high special resolution images of 1024 pixels and a pitch of 1.4mm. Also, tungsten collimation provides a high degree of precision. The standard configuration includes a detachable 10 mm collimator, CdTe detector, control table with detector stand and cable hanger, PC, 15-inch monitor, keyboard/mouse and the power and controller unit.

In recent demonstrations of the MGC500 compared with a gamma probe, of the metastatic lymph nodes found the MGC500 located at least one more than the probe in all cases, the company said. 

The camera works on a PC-based platform with mouse and keyboard-driven functions and data acquisition requirement settings. Clinical data can be stored on CD-R. Among the system’s software features are repetitive data acquisition mode for quasi-live imaging for positioning the detector; dynamic acquisition to grab sequential frames to create dynamic images; static acquisition to acquire a single frame; region of interest (ROI) analysis to analyze quantitative values such as total number of counts or pixels and count average; Time Activity Curve, a curve of counts in ROI vs. frames which is useful when viewing metabolism or functions of organs such as the liver, kidney or thyroid; image output as JPEG, BMP or PNG; and DICOM is available.