Peter Attia· MD
whereas on the other end of the scale you'll have the PET CT and now the PET CT basically couples the radiation from the CT and the CT scanner is basically a powerful x-ray that's spinning around the body and creating a three-dimensional view of you combined with the pet we is the positron emission tomography where you're taking radioactive glucose and you're actually labeling with fluorine and that fluorine is a radioactive fluorine 18 which actually now gives off a positron and that positron has tremendous amount of energy it's a highest energy that you can actually have in imaging for radiation and that's 511 kilo electron volts so very very high and so when you combine those two together you wind up getting typically when we actually give somebody radioactive glucose for a whole body scan for let's say they have cancer it's roughly 1 millisievert per Megan background but I guess I'm trying to convert the Canadian oh it's okay yeah we've got an international audience ship here you don't you don't have to make it Americanized right so we do it in mega barrels up here in Canada and so it's typically about 35 mega barrels per millisievert so typically somebody'll actually get the us dose would be about 12 millimoles and so that's about 212 millisieverts of radiation in addition to what they get on the CT scan so they could easily get 3040 millisieverts in total in that scan if they were doing her chest abdomen pelvis for example it's possible yeah and a lot of that radiation will come from the CT