MEDAMI 2026 Valencia

Session

Session 7: Deployment of Nuclear Medicine in LMICs: Enabling Technologies

16 May 2026, 16:10

BIOHUB VLC

Conveners

Session 7: Deployment of Nuclear Medicine in LMICs: Enabling Technologies

• Marco Paganoni
• TBD

30. Affordable crystals for PET technology

Rosana Martinez Turtos (Aarhus University)

16/05/2026, 16:10

The deployment of advanced nuclear medicine technologies in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remains severely limited by the high cost and complexity of current imaging systems, particularly positron emission tomography (PET) and total-body PET scanners. These systems require expensive scintillation materials, sophisticated electronics, and highly specialized infrastructure, creating...

37. Emerging Scintillator Technologies Toward Cost-Effective TOF PET

Dr Sun Il Kwon (University of California, Davis)

16/05/2026, 16:30

The dominant scintillator in clinical PET, lutetium-yttrium oxyorthosilicate (LYSO), requires expensive and energy-intensive crystal growth. The high instrumentation cost of LYSO-based PET systems limits their global deployment across much of the world. This presentation discusses two scintillator approaches offering realistic paths toward high-performance PET at substantially reduced cost,...

29. QATrack+: Enabling low-cost quality assurance for nuclear medicine in resource-constrained settings

Dr Matthew Strugari (Grupo de Investigación Biomédica de Imagen (GIBI230), Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria La Fe (IIS La Fe), Avenida Fernando Abril Martorell, 46026, Valencia, Spain)

16/05/2026, 16:50

QATrack+ is a free, open-source web application designed to manage quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA) data in medical physics. Although it was originally developed for radiotherapy applications, its flexible architecture has enabled increasing adoption in diagnostic imaging and nuclear medicine departments worldwide. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), access to robust...

31. High Performance, Cost-Effective Large Axial Field of View TOF-PET System Design

Joshua Cates (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

16/05/2026, 17:10

A challenge to widespread access to the transformational potential that long axial field-of-view (LAFOV) positron emission tomography (PET) systems bring to cancer imaging is their higher cost. There are new time-of-flight PET (TOF-PET) detectors and system implementations that can maintain and improve sensitivity and reconstructed image quality at substantially reduced material cost. We...

32. High-Performance Modular TOF-PET Imager as an Enabling Technology for Affordable Nuclear Medicine in LMICs

Rok Pestotnik (Jozef Stefan Institute (SI))

16/05/2026, 17:30

The limited deployment of positron emission tomography (PET) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is primarily driven by the high cost and complexity of conventional systems. We present a high-performance, modular time-of-flight (TOF) PET detector concept under development within the Horizon Europe EIC Pathfinder project PetVision, aimed at significantly reducing system cost while...

33. Democratizing Early Cancer Diagnosis in LMICs through a High-Efficiency, Low-Cost Enabling Technology: 3D-CBS Based on 3D-Flow

Dario Crosetto (Crosetto Foundation for the Reduction of Cancer Deaths)

16/05/2026, 17:50

Introduction
Nuclear medicine in Low- and Medium-Income Countries (LMICs) faces a critical challenge: access to life-saving technologies such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is restricted by unsustainable acquisition costs. While next-generation Total-Body PET (TBPET) systems offer superior clinical advantages, current market prices—reaching approximately $22.6 million per unit in...