CU6 - Media and Industry News, page-712

Yeah i agree with all of that.

Expensive as these are they still stack up financially for high throughput clinics but doubtful that any regional hospital will be buying any.
Clarity will have a substantial market for diagnostics either way.

'Conclusions: LAFOV has higher patient throughput at lower per-patient and total life-time operational costs and with lower radiopharmaceutical production demands. The least cost effective mode of operation is SAFOV in combination with extended hours (EH). Although the opportunities for research has made LAFOV attractive for academic centres, these data suggest that LAFOV systems are a potentially economic viable solution for community and resource limited settings.'

'The maximum number of patients that could scanned over a scanner lifetime was highest for LAFOV (88200 patients) compared to a single SAFOV with extended hours (76440), and highest for two LAFOV systems (176400). Despite the higher up-front cost of the scanner, the total lifetime expenditure (including all personnel related and operational costs) was lower for a single LAFOV (e.g. Canada $84.8 million) compared to two SAFOV ($96.5 million), and was even lower for two LAFOV systems (e.g. Canada $138.9 million) compared to two SAFOV systems with EH ($194 million)'

Don't forget also that the development of medium axial length scanners would reduce sensitivity but improved TOF goes a long way towards compensating for that.

'oth the scanner length and TOF have a significant impact on the sensitivity in LAFOV and TB PET imaging. With TOF resolution continually improving and now reaching below 200 ps,12,16 it is evident that TOF will be a key factor in future design considerations. Furthermore, the continuous TOF improvements over the last few years suggest that shorter PET scanners might achieve comparable effective sensitivity to current LAFOV PET scanners in the near future. For instance, while the uEXPLORER demonstrates a sensitivity approximately 8.7 times higher than the uMI Panorama, this comparison does not account for the effective sensitivity gain provided by superior TOF resolution. As a result, scanners without TB coverage could potentially suffice for most oncological and diagnostic tasks. '


So there's a lot happening.
For example:

'The WT-TB-PET is composed of two flat panels; each is 70 cm wide and 106 cm high, with a 50-cm gap between both panels. These design dimensions were justified by the patient sizes measured from the 40 random PET-CT scans. Each panel consists of 14 × 20 monolithic BGO detector blocks that are 50 × 50 × 16 mm in size and are coupled to a readout with 6 × 6 mm SiPMs arrays. For the WT-TB-PET, the detector surface is reduced by a factor of 1.9 and the scintillator volume by a factor of 2.2 compared to LAFOV PET systems, while demonstrating comparable sensitivity and much better uniform spatial resolution (< 2 mm in all directions over the FOV). The estimated component cost for the WT-TB-PET is 3.3 × lower than that of a 106 cm LAFOV system and only 20% higher than the PET component costs of a SAFOV.'

I'm gonna give it some time to find a bottom before i buy back in.