Canada. Annex 4-2.2 [Recent legislation developments]

In Canada, there are ~274 medical facilities performing diagnostic or therapeutic nuclear medicine procedures for a population of 35 million. Most of the nuclear medicine facilities are publicly-funded. There are 478 gamma cameras (264 SPECT and 214 SPECT-CT) and most of the 1 480 000 million nuclear medicine procedures are bone scintigraphy, lung ventilation/perfusion scans, and myocardial perfusion imaging. 60% of the nuclear medicine centres are supplied with radiopharmaceuticals from centralized radiopharmacies, while the others are relying on trained and certified technologists for the preparation of the radiopharmaceuticals. 49 PET scanners (47 PET-CT and 2 PET-MRI) are available in Canada for a total of ~77,000 PET scans annually. PET scans are mostly used for oncologic applications (>98%) and most of them are performed with [¹⁸F]FDG. [¹⁸F]FDG is available as the following approved products: CanTrace^TM, FluGlucoScan^TM, GLUCOVISION^TM and GLUDEF^TM.