Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

$2M gift brings scanner to Island cancer centre

Vancouver Islanders diagnosed with cancer will soon be able to have diagnostic scans completed in Victoria, saving them a trip to the mainland. The new PET/CT scanner, expected within a year, will allow doctors at the B.C.
Gordon Heys.jpg
Gordon Heys: "It's called giving back."

Vancouver Islanders diagnosed with cancer will soon be able to have diagnostic scans completed in Victoria, saving them a trip to the mainland.

The new PET/CT scanner, expected within a year, will allow doctors at the B.C. Cancer Vancouver Island Centre to investigate with precision the extent and seriousness of a patient’s cancer. Patients now must head to Vancouver, home of the province’s two existing scanners.

Acquisition of the scanner was made possible by a donation of more than $2 million from Nanaimo businessman Gordon Heys, who topped off a $5-million fundraising drive dedicated to bringing the machine to the Island.

Heys, 74, now well recovered after treatments for prostate cancer that had spread elsewhere in his body, said the new PET scanner could have been an effective tool during his treatment.

But the real reason behind his gift was the urge to help out.

“It’s called giving back,” Heys told reporters.

“It [a scanner] could have been a useful tool in my treatment, but it’s really a useful diagnostic tool in most cancers.”

PET stands for positron emission tomography. To use a PET scan, radioactive particles are injected into or ingested by a patient. Once in a body, these particles are more freely taken up by cancerous tumours. A cluster of particles close together reveals the location of a tumour.

CT, or computerized tomography, scans produce images from various angles through a body, and the slices are arranged to complete three-dimensional images of a patient’s body. Combined with a PET scan, they can reveal the precise location of a tumour and the spread of a cancer.

Dr. Peter Tonseth, a radiologist and nuclear medicine physician with the B.C. Cancer Agency, said the biggest advance is the ability to detect the spread of cancers — into the lymph systems, for example.

This extra diagnostic knowledge from the scan allows for a more precise and effective treatment by cancer specialists.

“We can look and say which lymph node needs to be further sampled and we may well even stage the patient’s treatment differently,” Tonseth said.

Sarah Roth, president and CEO of the B.C. Cancer Foundation, said about 1,500 residents of Vancouver Island annually head to Vancouver for the advanced scans, trips that will end when the new scanner is installed.

The fundraising campaign began one year ago and was kicked off by Thrifty Foods with a $1-million donation, Roth said. The company then rallied close to 1,800 other donors in an effort to raise funds. In the end, more than 3,500 donors contributed to the drive.

“This is huge,” she said. “This is going to make an enormous difference for so many families on Vancouver Island.”

rwatts@timescolonist.com