The Australian National Total Body PET Facility, launched just over a year ago, has shown that sharing PET infrastructure has proved to be a cost-effective model – bringing benefits to both patient care and research translation – that could be replicated across other centres and could equally apply to other expensive technologies.
The Australian National Imaging Facility, the University of Sydney and the Northern Sydney Local Health District joined forces to host the facility.
Total body PET (TB-PET) is a dramatic advance in medical imaging research, allowing imaging of all organs and tissues of the body simultaneously, increased resolution and sensitivity (better signal-to-noise ratios), shorter scanning times and lower doses of radiopharmaceuticals and radiation for patients.
Sharing resources and expertise has already paid off
Professor Dale Bailey, a professor in medical imaging science, says that a critical benefit of making this cutting-edge technology accessible to local researchers and clinicians has been the collaborative sharing of resources and expertise.
It was unlikely that total body PET would be fully used if it were installed in a purely academic environment, and the skills and resources to support the instrument in the clinical setting were already present.
Having the shared facility allows shared scanning time, shared costs (both capital and operational), shared knowledge, and distributed risks. The shared facility also means increased efficiency — previously a day clinic’s worth of scans can now be compressed to half a day with the same number of scans.
And both clinicians and researchers benefit from the exceptional image quality, ultimately leading to better patient outcomes.
Researchers can gather more data for no extra cost
The hospital could not have afforded the capital costs on its own; and their share of collaboration cost the same as a conventional state-of-the-art PET/CT system.
One benefit of the shared resource is the ability of researchers to add extra imaging to patient procedures without impacting clinical operations. In this way, researchers benefit by gaining access to data at no extra cost.
Using this method, researchers succeeded in testing new voxel-based pharmacologic models. The hospital’s clinicians have benefitted by gaining access to an ultra-low-dose CT protocol to scan pregnant women to manage their malignancies.
The shared resource has also received positive feedback from patients, with high satisfaction scores for the short scan time and general ambience of the environment.
Model gives a blueprint for other centres
This model provides a blueprint that leads the way for other centres that may not have the demand or the resources to install TB-PET or other expensive infrastructure for clinical or research use alone.
Placing this important infrastructure in a comprehensive teaching hospital, at the interface between academic researchers and large patient cohorts, is benefiting both patients and research teams – it is still early days, but the initial results are promising.
And in November 2024, the Australian Cancer Research Foundation’s 2024 grants were announced that included $12 million for NIF-supported grants to deliver two new research-dedicated total-body PET/CT scanners to benefit Australian health research. This expansion of the two new TB-PET facilities uses a similar shared clinical and research model as described above.
This story was originally published as an editorial by Professor Dale Bailey, a professor in medical imaging science, in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. The National Imaging Facility, The Sydney Imaging Core Research Facility at The University of Sydney, and the Northern Sydney Local Health District (NSLHD) operate in partnership to operate the TB-PET facility in the Department of Nuclear Medicine at Royal North Shore Hospital.
The Australian National Total Body PET Facility was established through a $15-million partnership and supported by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
Editorial reference: Bailey DL, Meikle SR, Calamante F, Angelis G, Roach PJ, Ringer SP. The Australian National Total-Body PET Facility—A Shared Resource and Risk Model for Implementing Total-Body PET. J Nucl Med. 2025:jnumed.125.269859.