Making up a temporary business association, Quibim, Full Body Insight and Oncovision have been subcontracted by the Regional Minister of Health of the Government of Valencia in Spain to develop a total-body PET/CT for simultaneous whole-body imaging. The $8.9 million project will reportedly leverage parts and technical expertise from GE Healthcare for the construction of a prototype.

"We will create automatic pipelines to obtain a virtual in vivo dissection of key organs using AI and characterize radiotracer and radiomics features. The output of this innovative collaboration will help clinicians reading a PET exam decide on which regions they must focus on to support patient diagnosis and prognosis evaluations,” said Angel Alberich-Bayarri, Quibim CEO and co-founder, in a statement.

The scanner is expected to display notably higher sensitivity from an increase in its axial coverage. This will reduce radiation dose or acquisition time while retaining the same image quality. The high quality spatial and time resolution is expected to generate images with very finite details in the highest contrast. Among those expected to benefit from this innovation are pediatric patients and adults that need various diagnostic tests to evaluate the efficiency of their treatments. The greater axial coverage will also allow for dynamic acquisitions of the main organs of the body simultaneously and in turn, the development of new medical applications.


Having built whole-body imaging solutions in the past, Quibim will offer the whole-body segmentation to perform automatic quantification of PET images. Full Body Insight brings its experience developing scintillator technologies for the application of total-body PET equipment and Oncovision offers expertise in molecular imaging equipment.

Also supporting the TBA are collaborations with public institutions, including the Institute of Instrumentation for Molecular Imaging, the Institute of Corpuscular Physics, and the Donostia International Physics Center.

In addition to the prototype, the project will also include the development of post-processing tools to advance PET/CT image analysis, with software developers delivering image reconstruction algorithms and identifying pertinent biomarkers to build the image processing platform.

The endeavor is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. The project is managed by the Technical Office, led by consulting firm Ayming.

The prototype scanner is expected to be completed by 2023.

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