The initial units of the Biomarker Generator will be shipped this summer.

Technology and capital

One technological innovation that is currently gaining ground in the PET/CT industry is time-of-flight, which allows for higher contrast images and ultimately higher resolution.

"It's actually dealing with the speed of light," says Dr. Graham. "It requires extraordinarily fast and very stable electronics. It is a significant engineering challenge to be able to do that."




Philips Healthcare was the first OEM to offer time-of-flight technology to its customers in 2006 and is continuing to work on it today.

"The advantages of this technology are pretty impressive," says Smith. "It could help our customers to reduce the radiopharmaceutical doses they use, it can help improve image quality, particularly with larger patients and it helps shorten scan times."

The reduction of radiation dose makes time-of-flight a useful application due to the increased effort by the FDA to reduce radiation exposure.

"You can cut the radiation in half and maintain excellent image quality. And that's important in the current climate of concern about radiation," says Dr. Graham. "I think that it's going to be an important aspect of PET imaging, trying to minimize radiation dose while still maintaining high quality images."

Manufacturers are aware of the importance of dose reduction for their clients. Last November, GE Healthcare launched ASiR, an "iterative reconstruction for CT, which offers the ability to reduce CT dose by 40 percent without any image compromise," says Bender.

ASiR is now available on the company's PET/CT platform.

Siemens Healthcare has dose reduction techniques such as CAREDose 4D and Adaptive Dose Shield technology on their PET/CT platform, which "reduce radiation doses to patients by measuring patient-specific attenuation correction and adjusting CT dose according to body size," says Robert Brait, national product manager for PET/CT of the Molecular Imaging Division for Siemens Healthcare.

In addition to oncology, PET/CT is also growing in cardiac and neurological specialties.

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