If you’ve ever had a PET scan, you know it’s an ordeal. The scans help doctors detect cancer and track its spread, but the process itself is a logistical nightmare for patients.
It starts with fasting for four to six hours before coming into the hospital — and good luck to you if you live rurally and your local hospital doesn’t have a PET scanner. When you get to the hospital, you’re injected with radioactive material, after which you must wait for an hour while it washes through your body. Next, you enter the PET scanner and have to attempt to lie still for 30 minutes while radiologists acquire the image. After that, you have to keep physically away from the elderly, young people, and pregnant women for up to 12 hours because you’re literally semi-radioactive.
Another bottleneck? PET scanners are concentrated in major cities because their radioactive tracers must be produced in nea
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