 What makes for excellence in heart care? It starts with one of the most amazing teams of heart surgeons and cardiologists that I've seen assembled under one roof and the region's leading technology in a new $40 million facility. This is the nationally recognized Heart and Vascular Institute of Eastern Kentucky at Pikeville Medical Center. Recently, Pikeville Medical Center has been performing a new type of PET scan that is specifically designed to identify and help diagnose prostate cancer. The new scan is now 92% accurate as opposed to the previous 65% accuracy. Pikeville Medical Center is the only hospital in the east Kentucky region conducting these scans to provide a higher quality service to their patients. The new PSMA PET is a beautiful piece of technology and the reason we like it so much is that if you use traditional bone scans which were the standard of care for staging prostate, the accuracy for that test was only 65%. The new PET scan accuracy is 92% so it is a game changing. So the reason that's important is because it better stages, better prognosticates, better tells us what to expect with prostate cancer, how to treat it, and what to do with that information. So it helps us to decide about radiation, surgery, hormone blockade, even chemotherapy. It truly changes the way that we treat prostate cancer. The new technology allows for targeted scans in parts of the body. Once any cancer cells have been identified, oncologists can move towards the treatment phase. The traditional PET scans when we do that, they just look at uptake of sugar. So things that are uptaking sugar that are growing faster can live on PET scan. And a traditional PET scan lights up anything that's like, you know, infection can light up on a traditional PET scan, cancer that's fast growing can light up on PET scan. But with the new technology, we're starting to get targeted for a specific cancer type. So we always talk about, you know, targeted therapy for the treatment. This is targeted therapy for the diagnosis. And I think that we are the only facility in eastern Kentucky that has that technology. And so if you don't get it in Pikeville, you're going to be going to Lexington, Louisville, Cleveland Clinic, somewhere like that. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Colum.