'Serial review on clinical PET tracers'. Application of health insurance of [15O]oxygen PET and [18F]FDG-PET

As regards the application required for health insurance of PET, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare indicates the following procedures: first, request a permission to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare for the clinical use of the automatic synthetic instrument for PET drug, approved according to the Pharmaceutical Affairs Law. Second, put into practice the use of PET test, under the highly advanced medicine premises. Then, in case of gathered positive results, the health insurance is approved for this PET test. Thus, following the above mentioned procedures, first, the use of [15O] oxygen PET was approved in April 1996. Second, the use of [18F]FDG-PET was approved in 12 different diseases: epilepsy, ischemic heart disease and 10 different types of cancer, in April 2002. Third, in April 2006, a additional 3 types of cancer were approved. Now, we are in the process to get the health insurance of all kinds of malignant tumors (cancer and sarcoma) except for the early gastric cancer. (author)