Mobile PET scanner could be a good option for Sudbury, doctor says

Morning North7:42Sudbury's PET Scanner - is the province playing games?

A Sudbury doctor says the province is purposely putting up roadblocks when it come to getting Sudbury a PET scanner. Dr. Dave Webster is a nuclear medicine doctor. He explained his position to the CBC's Marina von Stackelberg.

A doctor of nuclear medicine says Sudbury could have a PET scanner here next week if the province allowed a mobile version of the cancer detecting equipment.

In December, the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care announced it would pay to operate a permanent scanner as early as April.

But first, the community must raise millions of dollars to buy the machine.

A Positron Emission Tomography (PET)  machine uses a type of sugar to detect cancer, cardiac issues and even dementia, and can detect cancer that CT or MRI scans miss.

The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care has told Sudbury it's up to residents to raise the money needed to buy the region's first machine, which is estimated to cost as much as $5 million dollars.

• Ontario government stalling introduction of PET scanners
• Sudbury should've had PET scanner 'a long time ago'
• Province to pay operating costs for PET scanner in Sudbury

Dr. Dave Webster told CBC News a mobile scanner could have been brought in immediately to do scans until a permanent machine could be purchased.

Webster, who is one of the leading experts on the technology, said announcing a permanent scanner was a tactic to buy the province more time before it has to start paying for operations.

"They've implied that we'll have one here April first.  The sun will come up in the west before that happens," he said.

"They knew that this is not going to physically be possible."

The ministry said it decided against a mobile PET scanner because of the stops it would make on route to Sudbury and the affect that would have on the shelf life of isotopes, the atoms used to run the scans.

But Webster said that's not the case, as the isotopes would have been delivered separately by plane.

"We could literally have this pet scanner up here next Tuesday. And the only infrastructure cost required is a 220 volt plug-in line," he said.

'This is not new'

Dr. Kevin Tracey, who runs an independent mobile PET scanner in Windsor, said mobile scanners allow smaller cities to share the cost of the machine and reduces the need for patient travel.

"Communities such as Windsor and Sudbury — and other sites that don't necessarily have the patient population numbers to support a stand-alone unit on their own — basically share a unit," he said.

"If Ontario instituted a series of routes, then the province could be utilizing PET very quickly in a lot of centres like Sudbury," he said, adding that this type of system has been in use in the United States for some time.

The mobile scanner is "a stepping stone to what your goal is: to have a permanent PET on site," Tracey continued.

"We're saying this is a quick and easy way to get up and going using the operational dollars that were offered on April," he said. 'We could have been mobilized and in place before then to take advantage of those funding dollars to help patients get imaged right away."

Tracey's mobile scanner has been in operation for five years. He said he was approached two years ago by the provincial government to show how mobile scans could work — and was in discussion with the ministry to bring a mobile PET scanner to Sudbury.

Tracey said he was not notified that the permanent scanner had been decided for Sudbury until it was publicly announced.

"They didn't have any communication with us a week before the announcement," he said.