From the June 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


HCB News: In early 2017 you announced some new partnerships that would help bring your vision to life. Can you tell us about those?
B & C: We announced a joint partnership with United Imaging America, a young medical imaging company with a track record of developing new PET imaging devices, and SensL, a company that builds solid-state light detectors known as silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs). SensL will be providing the light detectors that United Imaging will be using to build the radiation detectors that will go in the scanner. The SensL detectors offer better performance than conventional vacuum photomultiplier tubes, and in addition, this technology will reduce the power consumption by close to a factor of 10, an important consideration for a device of this scale. United Imaging has a strong team of engineers working on the scanner, and very importantly from our point of view, they have a very solid quality control system for their detector manufacturing. This kind of quality control is almost impossible for us to replicate in the lab and should go a long way toward ensuring reliability for the final device. There also is a high probability that these partnerships will lead to the availability of a commercial system, allowing the technology to be disseminated around the world.


HCB News: What issues are you currently working on with relation to developing the scanner?
B & C: Critical issues are: speeding up the data processing and image reconstruction so that we can handle the massive amounts of data that we will be generating; and testing the various components in a second small-scale system. We hope to have our hands on this small-scale device in the next three months or so.

HCB News: Do you ever hear from skeptics who question the clinical value of your research? What do you tell them?
B & C: Absolutely! I would say that when we started, probably three-quarters of our colleagues in the field questioned us on the value of this. However, as we have kept making the arguments, that number has probably gone down to about 20 percent, and there are now multiple sites across the world that have expressed an interest in obtaining a total-body PET scanner.

Actually, we welcome skepticism. It ensures that we stay on track with our arguments and helps prevent us from engaging in sloppy thinking. The biggest argument we hear is that the device will be just too expensive. But when all the installation requirements are factored in, this device won't be very much more expensive than a very-high-field (e.g. 7 tesla) MRI scanner, and we believe it opens up many more avenues of research. We are looking forward to using this scanner to try to answer a whole range of questions that we could not hope to look at before, and to finding out who is right! Also, as with all new technologies, initial costs often are high, but if we can demonstrate clear benefit that, in turn, generates demand, then there will be pressures and opportunities to reduce cost.

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