From the June 2021 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


HCB News: In the past we talked about peers questioning the clinical value of such a heavy duty scanner, has that changed?
RB & SC: There are, of course, legitimate concerns about cost for such a scanner, and these concerns are amplified for centers that don’t have a research portfolio. In parts of the world where there is significant unmet need, a high-throughput scanner like EXPLORER can justify itself quite easily. In places where clinical demand is lower, the argument revolves around the value that very high-quality imaging brings to patient care, and we are still collecting data to answer that question. But the groundbreaking value of this scanner is really in doing things that could not be done before, such as total-body systems imaging, total-body parametric imaging, and high-quality immunoPET.

HCB News: Has anything about the uExplorer surprised you? Does it have capabilities you hadn't foreseen in the development stages?
RB & SC: Perhaps the most remarkable capability is the ability to perform total-body dynamic imaging with 100 ms frame-rate. We have now seen radiotracer being mixed in the chambers of the heart with each individual heartbeat, and pumped around the vascular tree in three dimensions. We never imagined that we would be able to do this when we conceived of this scanner.

HCB News: As researchers pushing the boundaries of what's possible in medical imaging, what do you think might be possible in another 10 or 15 years?
RB & SC: Scientists in our lab and in other labs around the world are busy developing PET detectors that are 20 times faster than the ones used in the EXPLORER scanner. Once such technology can be scaled up, this is going to result in total-body PET that is at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the EXPLORER scanner. Given that we have yet to fully determine what the current scanner can do, the possibilities for the future are wildly exciting!

HCB News: What do you see as critical healthcare challenges (globally or within the U.S.) that require more urgent attention?
RB & SC: One could argue that key healthcare challenges of our time relate to obesity and its related metabolic, cardiac, vascular, musculoskeletal and oncogenic consequences. There is a critically important role for total-body PET in understanding the systemic interactions that underpin these consequences and in finding ways to improve the underlying health of the population. Both the low-dose capabilities and the total-body imaging capabilities of the technology are critically important in this effort.

HCB News: Do you have any new projects in the pipeline?
RB & SC: Many! In terms of scanner building, though, our key effort is another collaboration with United Imaging Healthcare, this time led by Yale University — we seek to build the next-generation, ultrahigh-performance brain PET scanner: the NX, or Neuro-eXplorer. This was recently funded by the NIH BRAIN initiative. We’re also bringing online new radiotracers, with one focus being the development of methods to quantify perfusion and blood volume throughout the entire body. We also have plans to expand into areas where PET has not been widely used, for example, in studies of nutrition and meditation.

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