What kind of patients need a PET scan?
There are all sorts of different patients, but the two most important groups are those with cancer and cardiac diseases. PET scanners have been developed to trace different molecules in the body, and they can help answer different questions. They help, for example, to investigate the energy metabolism of a tumor or can show how well the blood is pumped through the heart, so-called myocardial perfusion scans.

How long have PET scanners been used in hospitals?
Their use started around 2005 and there have been massive improvements on the technical side since then. The number of PET scans in hospitals has gone up 20% every year for the last 15 years.

Why is demand rising so fast?
It’s a non-invasive method and not hard at all on the patient. Even if the PET scanners use radioactive tracer substances, the radiation dose is low. But most importantly, it’s the gold standard because it is the most precise scanner.

For every scan, we needed one lab technician in the radiopharmacy to produce 15O-water and one lab technician to take it and run to the scanner, because it has such a short half-life.

The startup Medtrace has developed a system that produces the tracer substance 15O-water on site. When did you first hear of them?
We’ve been in contact with them for a couple of years now, through a Professor that was involved in the early development of the software that helps to analyze the scans. Before we installed their system as the first in Denmark we had been doing myocardial perfusion scans for many years, but it was very inefficient and labor-intensive. For every scan, we needed one lab technician in the radiopharmacy to produce 15O-water and one lab technician to take it and run to the scanner, because it has such a short half-life. That was the reason why we just did this in a research setting, not in actual clinical practice.

How much easier does the MedTrace make the use of 15O-water?
It’s pretty easy actually. You insert a cannula in the veins and hit a button, basically. On average, it takes about 23 minutes to do a whole procedure. I mentioned that the half-life is very short, so the radiation is quickly gone, and the fascinating thing is that we use water as a tracer. But the benefit is real. Earlier tracer produced less sensitive pictures, and now we can see what is happening even in the small blood vessels of the heart. The device fits nicely into the clinical setup and with its sensitivity, the radio-cardiologists can be sure they don’t overlook small things. We’ve done several hundred scans since January 2021 already.

Will other hospitals adopt this system easily?
First of all, a hospital needs a PET scanner and cyclotron capacity for this to make sense, but for those who have this in place already, I don’t see why they wouldn’t want to use it. It’s clearly a piece of equipment for university clinics and larger regional hospitals, not for a small clinic. Depending on their setup, they might need another cyclotron because you need a dedicated one for the whole procedure, but while cyclotrons used to be a quite expensive piece of equipment they now come in all shapes and sizes. I personally am curious about the ongoing improvement of the system, for example, a more automated software solution that will allow analyzing the pictures even more rapidly. I think that with this kind of image quality, we can develop all kinds of diagnostics in the years to come.