Covenant Health and CTI Form International Research and Training Center for Revolutionary Cancer Detection Device Thompson Cancer Center's West Location to be CTI's International Training Site Tony Spezia, President and CEO of Covenant Health, announced at a September 10 press conference that Covenant has partnered with leading medical technology firm CTI to form an international research and training center for new medical imaging systems. Speaking to a crowd of nearly 200 community, political and business leaders, Spezia stated that Knoxville will become CTI's primary test facility for the introduction of new technology. It is the only test facility of its kind in the world. "It is highly unusual for a city the size of Knoxville to have an oupatient facility offer this kind of cutting-edge technology. You would normally have to be in a much larger city to have access to a diagnostic tool such as this, " Spezia said. Because the test facility is located at Covenant's Thompson Cancer Survival Center West, patients all across our region will have access to the newest state-of-the-art scanners before they are commercially available elsewhere. "This means that for many years to come, hundreds of top physicians and medical personnel from all over the world will come to Knoxville for our training expertise," Spezia said. This is nothing new for Thompson, which is the world's training site for Photodynamic Therapy, a laser treatment for early esophageal cancer and respiratory gating, a treatment for lung cancer both pioneered by physicians and physicists at Thompson. The first scanning device to be installed at Thompson is the ECAT ACCEL PET scanner. PET technology allows physicians to view information about the body's chemistry that is not available with other imaging techniques. Unlike X-rays, CT scans or MRI, which show only body structure, the ACCEL scanner reveals metabolic information. This allows for earlier and more accurate diagnosis of disease and illness. Beginning later this fall, the latest PET technology will be available at Thompson via the ACCEL Scanner. This diagnostic imaging scanner, made with patented technology, has superior accuracy, reducing whole body scanning time from 40 to 20 minutes. This ACCEL scanner is the only one of its kind in the Southeastern United States. The power of PET medical imaging technology is that it enables physicians to view how organ systems of the body are functioning at a cellular level. PET is unsurpassed as a definitive diagnostic tool because it can help the physician detect cancer and determine appropriate treatment for the disease, and efficiently track the body's response to treatment. Guests at the press conference were treated to a boxed lunch, a special gift and a tour of Thompson West, including the PET Imaging suite, which is still under construction. An open house for physicians and the community will be announced for sometime later this year.