Delegates at the inaugural of the Asia Oceania Congress of Nuclear Medicine and Biology in Guindy on Thursday.
| Photo Credit: B. VELANKANNI RAJ
The Asia Oceania Congress of Nuclear Medicine and Biology, conducted by the The Society of Nuclear Medicine, India, (SNMI) was inaugurated in Chennai on Thursday (December 4, 2025).
The congress, which brought together 250 international and 450 national faculty, and 1,200 delegates, is a four-day event that aims to spread awareness on nuclear medicine and scale up its services in India, said E. Prabhu, president, SNMI.
Nuclear medicine is a specialty of medicine in which minute quantities of radioactive material are used for diagnosis and treatment. While it is now a well-established specialty in India, with 540 nuclear medicine centres, it still serves only a small fraction of the population and is heavily concentrated in the private sector, Dr. Prabhu said.
Currently, 87% of the nuclear medicine centres function in the private sector, while a majority of training happens at government institutions. “At present, our 540 centres serve, on an average, 0.7 per million population. In the United States, nuclear medicine centres serve 4 per million of the population; in Germany, it is 10 per million, and in Japan, 20 per million,” he pointed out.
The need for greater awareness, greater patronage and financial resources as well as innovative strategies to scale up nuclear medicine services are some of the many issues being discussed at the Congress, Dr. Prabhu contended. “In order to scale up to at least a few per million in India, we will require 2,700 centres,” he said.
Dr. Prabu added that the Congress aimed to bring the best brains of nuclear medicine together under one roof, to be able to work on taking nuclear therapy to every household that needed it.
Published – December 04, 2025 06:36 pm IST
Leave a Reply