 This is Jenny. Jenny has a tumour growing deep in her lungs that she doesn't know about yet. But it's starting to cause problems, and if it's not found soon, Jenny will almost certainly die. Fortunately, Jenny lives in the 21st century, when doctors can find deadly tumours like hers using groundbreaking medical imaging technology. In the old days, if a doctor wanted to avoid exploratory surgery, he would only have one way of seeing inside a patient. The X-ray machine was invented in 1895 and for many decades was our only way of viewing inside the body. But X-rays have limitations for cancer diagnosis. They only show bones and large masses. Small but aggressive tumours like Jenny's would go unnoticed. We are in many cases, in many patients, too late with our diagnostics. They're already metastases. The tumour is not curable anymore and this is what we want to avoid. In the 1970s, researchers found a way to use computers to combine multiple X-rays from different angles and the CT scanner was born. Now, doctors could see in three dimensions and with much more definition, revealing details of internal organs as well as bones. If Jenny was scanned at this point in history, the doctors might have spotted her tumour as a mass on the CT scan. What they wouldn't know is what the tumour is doing. Is it active and growing, or does it seem benign? These questions were answered by PET scans. In PET technology, a radioactive tracer is attached to a carrier molecule that is designed to go straight to the tumour. Then special cameras record the tracer's path through the body. Radiopharmaceuticals revolutionised medicine because they allowed us to see beyond the visible and understand the metabolic activity inside a tumour. These images started grainy but greatly improved over the years. By displaying the biochemistry in the living body, you can improve the prediction of outcome. So you can better guide treatment and you have a better prediction of the prognosis of the patient. For example, survival. PET will make an aggressive tumour, even a very tiny one glow like a light in the dark. But without any anatomical landmarks, Jenny's doctors would have found it hard to precisely locate the tumour. The combination of PET with CT in the early 2000s solved this problem and really changed the game for medical imaging. These advanced hybrid images not only help doctors detect and locate very small tumours, they also show if a tumour has spread from its original site. The next step in the evolution of medical imaging combined the PET approach with an MRI. This provides even more detail and is helpful in particularly tricky cases, like when the tumour is in organs such as the brain or the liver. Using radiopharmaceuticals for PET and combining this information with that coming from the CT or the MRI will really provide good details for the diagnosis and the follow-up of the patients. But the most exciting thing for me is combining that information with the use of radiopharmaceuticals for targeted therapies. That is something that we call teranostics. The radioactive tracer used in PET imaging is designed to travel straight to a tumour to help us see and understand it. But teranostics takes this a step further. By changing the radioactive element in the tracer we can turn it into a guided bullet tailored to track down cancer cells and destroy them without harming the organs nearby. With all these breakthroughs in imaging and personalised medicine, Jenny's doctors can now find her tumour at an early stage. They can tell how aggressive it is and see if it's spread and they can even use that technology to target and destroy it. Providing treatment tailored to exactly what is happening inside her body gives Jenny a much higher chance of survival.