The beauty of positron technology is that, first of all, it does not depend on nuclear reactors whatsoever. To produce isotopes, we need a cyclotron. Hospitals and universities have one. There is one at the Molecular Imaging Centre in Sherbrooke, one at the Montreal Neurological Institute, one belonging to a private company called Pharmalogic in Montreal. There are also several in Ontario. This equipment uses electricity. So we establish a target, turn on the electricity to the cyclotron and isotopes are produced.
The disadvantage of isotopes produced using the cyclotron is that these isotopes have short half-lives, half lives of 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 110 minutes, 3 hours. This is far from technetium's 6 hours or even further from molybdenum's 66 hours. As a result, these isotopes need to be produced each day they are used.
What else do we need, in addition to cyclotrons, for positron imagery? We need special equipment. We cannot use the SPECT devices, the gamma-cameras that use technetium, in order to use the positron. This means that the some 600 SPECT devices available in Canada cannot be used with positrons. We are really limited to the 30 devices available. These are relatively costly devices. We are talking about technology worth approximately $2.2 million. SPECT technology, a 2010 technology, which uses technetium, costs $1.1 million. The PET device is only twice as expensive.
The results are far better in terms of diagnoses. Exams are much shorter. A bone scan exam using nuclear medicine may last four hours. The patient must then spend four hours at the hospital in order to undergo the exam. The same exam done using sodium fluoride positron technology will last 45 minutes. So there are a number of advantages, including better resolution, better diagnoses, much less time spent in the hospital, and many more patients can be diagnosed each day. That is why this technology, in 10 or 15 years, will become the preferred technology. However, we are not there yet. We do not have enough cyclotrons.
Furthermore, I would like to stress that these famous cyclotrons can produce isotopes using positrons. The cyclotrons are really helping us survive this shortage to some extent. They are producing thallium and gallium-67. The nuclear reactor is producing iodine-131 and technetium-99, by using molybdenum and nuclear medicine. The remaining isotopes are produced using cyclotrons. So it is a good hybrid technology that can produce old isotopes one day and new ones the next.