Department of Nuclear Medicine @ Ospedale San Raffaele

Nuclear Medicine Centre of the San Raffaele Research Hospital is a worldwide recognized Centre with multidisciplinary top-level expertise for functional imaging, particularly focused on the diagnosis of oncological patients.

Nuclear Medicine and particularly PET modality is a functional imaging enabled to image specific molecules and targets (cellular and molecular events). To obtain those images, there is a very complex department that extends over 1500m2 with an interdisciplinary staff.

The staff is composed of:

• 14 Nuclear Medicine Physicians
• 1 Neurology Physician
• 3 Physicists
• 1 Biomedical Engineer
• 20 Technologists
• 13 Radiochemists
• 7 Nurses
• 5 Research Fellows

Last year the Department performed approximately 8.000 SPECT clinical studies, including Myocardial studies, Bone scintigraphy, Renal scintigraphy studies, Thyroid scintigraphy and Sentinel lymph node scintigraphy studies, and approximately 7.500 PET clinical studies, the majority of them were Total body FDG for different oncological diseases, but also Total Body Choline for prostate cancer evaluation, and brain studies.

It is a comprehensive Centre with a Cyclotron for the production of radioligands; it has Radiochemistry and radio-pharmacy labs dedicated to the synthesis of radiopharmaceuticals. It has to be emphasized that the labs are already settled according to GMP requirements for clinical research. PET laboratories are able to ensure the quality and safety of radiopharmaceuticals production for diagnostic use complying with national and European regulations.

The facility also has SPECT and PET tomographs for clinical studies. In particular, it has 4 SPECT tomographs: 2 dedicated to cardiological studies, and one SPECT/CT. It has 3 PET/CT and, a very innovative, fully hybrid PET/MRI system that was recently installed at the Unit, one of its kind in Italy. There are also 2 dedicated rooms for radio-immunotherapy.