Message from the President-Elect of the World Federation of Nuclear Medicine and Biology

Excerpt

The 12th Asia Oceania Congress of Nuclear Medicine has just come to an end. Once again this congress corroborated the fact that in Asia and the Oceania region, though many efforts have so far been delivered by the leaders, nuclear medicine is in its infancy in Asia. In the eloquent era of global precision and personalized medicine, most Asian countries are still struggling with the infrastructure of nuclear medicine. Exceptions are Japan, Korea, and China. They preform 5 million nuclear medicine procedures (imaging and therapy) annually: 2 million in Japan, 1 million in Korea, and 2 million in China. As expected, each country has its own problems or hurdles to overcome, i.e., Bangladesh has well-designed infrastructure but economic development has not caught up; Mongolia, Yemen, and Nepal have imminent work to raise pioneers of nuclear medicine physicians at home; China needs to immediately educate a multitude of nuclear medicine physicians and scientists to double the institution and clinical volumes in every prefecture. Japan has witnessed the decline of nuclear medicine practices recently and the loss of nuclear medicine’s disciplinary standing while securing subspecialty status according to the recent progress of legalization of disciplines. Korea has experienced a painful setback, to the level of 10 years ago, in the clinical volume of PET procedures due to an irrational amendment of PET reimbursement guidelines in the national health insurance system. All of these challenges and changes have existed since the birth of our discipline in every country as well as globally. The responses to these challenges damaged and in some cases strengthened our discipline’s status directing our endeavor to make nuclear medicine more appropriate and beneficial to clinicians and patients. …