From the basement to forefront of imaging: the future of nuclear medicine.

Nuclear medicine and positron emission tomography (PET) continues to be on the forefront of molecular imaging. In the past decade, PET imaging established itself as the gold standard for cancer staging and therapy follow up. To lesser extent, PET is also used clinically in cardiology (myocardial perfusion) and neurology (dementia). The wide adoption of oncology applications of FDG PET imaging drove technology development towards (1) improvements in image quality and (2) integration with anatomical imaging. PET image quality improvements were achieved by novel detector design, commercialization of the time of flight PET & advances in patient motion management. Today, almost all new PET systems are integrated with diagnostic CT scanners. Combination of anatomical detail provided by CT with metabolic / molecular information from PET improved diagnostic accuracy and proved the usefulness of multimodality imaging in a routine clinical setting. From the basement to forefront of imaging: the future of nuclear medicine