A report by DOTmed News made the following five points on the market for nuclear medicine equipment.
1. Rise of PET-MR combinations. Siemens Medical Solutions recently won FDA approval for the first simultaneous PET-MR, the Biograph mMR. The Ingenuity TF PET/MR, a similar system from Philips Healthcare, recently won CE marking for sale in Europe.
2. SPECT still important. Single-photon emission computerized tomography, using a radioactive substance to create 3-D pictures, accounts for about 7 million procedures a year and will likely retain high volume in the face of PET-MR. However, shortages of certain radioisotopes may disrupt SPECT's future.
3. Specter of 2009 reimbursement cuts. The market still has not recovered from the 2009 cut in Medicare reimbursements to freestanding imaging centers. Orders for PET units, which had been booming in 2006, plummeted by 2009.
4. Freestanding centers align with hospitals. As a result to the 2009 cut, many freestanding imaging centers have aligned with hospitals. Some alignments are looser than others, but they all involve taking advantage of more robust reimbursements to hospitals for imaging.
5. Opportunities for other arrangements. Physicians who might have had their own imaging equipment have been working with companies that provide expensive imaging technology through a lease. Meanwhile, it is not yet clear whether the market in refurbished imaging equipment will take off. Refurbished items with the latest technologies are still scarce.
Read the DOTmed News report on nuclear medicine equipment.
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