# Nuclear medicine and total-body PET hardware

Source: https://nuclide.cc/technologies/nuclear-medicine-hardware/  
Nuclide record `nuclear-medicine-hardware` (Technology). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from Nuclide (nuclide.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Nuclear medicine hardware means the scanners themselves: PET/CT, SPECT/CT, and new total-body PET that images the whole body at once.

## Summary

Siemens Healthineers (Biograph Vision Quadra), GE HealthCare (Omni Legend), United Imaging (uEXPLORER, uMI Panorama), Canon Medical (Cartesion Prime), and Positron/Mediso occupy the PET/CT market; SPECT/CT for dosimetry from Siemens, GE, and Spectrum Dynamics. Total-body and long-axial-field-of-view PET raise sensitivity roughly 40-fold, enabling low-dose, dynamic, and multi-tracer studies relevant to theranostics.

## Fields

- Kind: Technology
- Status: established
- Last checked: 2026-09-08
- Tags: supporting
- Principle: Silicon photomultiplier detector rings with time-of-flight, coupled to CT for attenuation correction; long axial coverage captures the whole body in one bed position.
- Strengths: Sensitivity and speed; Dosimetry for radioligand therapy
- Limitations: Capital cost (total-body >$10M); Data volume; Reimbursement not tied to sensitivity

## Sources

- Badawi et al., First human imaging studies with the EXPLORER total-body PET scanner (Journal of Nuclear Medicine 2019): https://doi.org/10.2967/jnumed.119.226498

## Connected records

- technologies: [PET (positron emission tomography)](https://nuclide.cc/technologies/pet/), [PET/CT](https://nuclide.cc/technologies/pet-ct/), [Radioligand therapy (beta emitters)](https://nuclide.cc/technologies/radioligand-therapy/), [SPECT & bone scan](https://nuclide.cc/technologies/spect/)
- companies: [Canon Medical Systems](https://nuclide.cc/companies/canon-medical/), [GE HealthCare](https://nuclide.cc/companies/ge-healthcare/), [Hamamatsu Photonics](https://nuclide.cc/companies/hamamatsu/), [Siemens Healthineers](https://nuclide.cc/companies/siemens-healthineers/), [United Imaging](https://nuclide.cc/companies/united-imaging/)
- bottlenecks: [Hot lab and shielded treatment room capacity](https://nuclide.cc/bottlenecks/b-hot-lab-capacity/), [Nuclear medicine technologist and physicist workforce](https://nuclide.cc/bottlenecks/b-nuclear-medicine-workforce/)
- ideas: [Using total-body PET's sensitivity to cut diagnostic tracer dose, not just scan time](https://nuclide.cc/ideas/idea-total-body-pet-lower-dose-tracers/)
- isotopes: [Technetium-99m](https://nuclide.cc/isotopes/tc-99m/)
- terms: [Time-of-flight (TOF) PET](https://nuclide.cc/terms/time-of-flight-pet/)

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