Speaker
Description
How to build systems that matter? To this, we made some practical observations in the narrow field of brain PET in the last years. The applications of brain PET in diagnostics for primary brain tumors, dementia, movement disorders, epilepsy, drug development, and neuroimaging research were so far not enough to warrant a revival of dedicated brain PET systems. The anticipated use together with treatments against Alzheimer’s disease is still lacking, while noninvasive tau and amyloid diagnostic competition from plasma-assays is rising.
Yet, in this talk, we point out three macro-observations. First, in larger PET-centers, the upcoming whole-body PET/CT systems are raising the price pressure, favoring high throughput routine oncology applications. This has an adverse effect on neuroimaging in these centers. Second, in case of the anticipated application of Alzheimer’s disease treatment accompanying diagnostic, the need is so large, that plasma-assays and PET imaging will likely co-exist. Third, brain PET applications and reimbursement practices are growing, also besides Alzheimer’s disease treatment accompanying diagnostic, which might become market drivers on their own.
We will share our conclusions from these observations and from clinician’s interviews that have guided our system development of the dedicated brain PET system NeuroLF. In the end, the bar is to cross the threshold of relevance: The frequency of procedures at which a dedicated system becomes economic to use.
We extracted a core vision, in which NeuroLF addresses challenges that clinicians and clinical researchers face already today. We point to our system optimizations in improving system performance that matters in an efficient way, in the untapped potential in open brain PET data and open software communities, in stepping towards dynamic imaging in the clinical routine, and in bringing PET to the patient with small-scale ambulatory and point-of-care systems.
