Department of Nuclear Medicine

Inselspital Bern

The Department is one of the largest and most advanced nuclear medicine departments in Switzerland. It offers the entire spectrum of modern nuclear medicine examination and treatment methods, with emphasis on diagnostics using state-of-the-art PET/CT and SPECT/CT hybrid scanners, as well as nuclear medicine therapy procedures.

To the Inselspital website

Director

Prof. Axel Rominger

Profile

  • Research in clinical PET imaging with emphasis on total-body PET in the context of oncological, neurological, and cardiovascular diseases (early diagnosis, differential diagnosis).
  • Preclinical and GMP-related radiopharmacy, biomedical engineering, instrumentation, dosimetry, artificial intelligence, and preclinical PET imaging.
  • Further expand the therapeutic spectrum in Nuclear Medicine with the advent of novel radioligand therapies.
  • Teaching students in the fields of medicine, biomedical engineering, and radiochemistry. Education of NM technologists.

External Partners

Dept. of Nuclear Medicine, Technical University Munich; Dept. of Nuclear Medicine, Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich; Fudan University Shanghai, China; Institute of Nuclear Chemistry, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz; MGH AI Center, Harvard Medical School, USA; Dept. of Nuclear Medicine, Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiaotong University, China; Dept. of Molecular Pharmacology, UCLA, USA; School of Medical Technology, Peking University, Beijing, China; Dept. of Nuclear Medicine, Shanghai Jiaotong University, China; PET Center at UC Davis, USA; Dept. Nuclear Medicine, Seoul National University Hospital; Department of Experimental Particle Physics and Applications, Jagiellonian University, Poland

Grants

  • Swiss National Science Foundations (grant no. 200021_188914; IZKSW3_188350; 310030_192704; 200021E_216944 / 1)
  • Foundation for Clinical and Experimental Tumor Research
  • Eureka (Innosuisse) (4842)
  • SBFI (grant no. 101073231)
  • Parkinson Schweiz
  • SF Board 2025
  • Sinergia (CRSII-222763)

Highlights 2025

Ultra-low Dose PET Scans Allow Minimal Radiation Burden

Our study demonstrated that high-quality whole-body PET images can be obtained with injected 18F-FDG activities below 10 MBq which result in a radiation burden comparable to a trans-atlantic flight. These ultra-low-dose and CT-less PET protocols could broaden PET applications, particularly in pediatric populations, healthy individuals undergoing screening for cancer, and patients requiring more frequent scans for treatment monitoring.

Sari et al., J Nucl Med. 2025

Optimizing theranostics chatbots with context augmented large language models

Nuclear medicine theranostics is rapidly emerging, as an interdisciplinary therapy option with multi-dimensional considerations. Chatbots using Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are gaining interest addressing these challenges. However, chatbot performances often fall short in specific domains, which is critical in healthcare applications. This study develops a framework to examine the use of contextual augmentation to improve the performance of medical theranostic chatbots to create a first theranostic chatbot.

Koller et al., Theranostics. 2025

Lymphoma Therapy Response Assessment with Low-Dose [18F]FDG Total-Body PET/CT

The improved sensitivity of total-body (TB) PET/CT offers the possibility of reducing injected activities. The aim of our study was to define a lower limit of reduced injected activities in [18F]FDG TB PET/CT for interim and end-of-treatment assessment of patients with lymphoma at 2 acquisition times. Dose reduction of injected activity in patients with lymphoma is possible with TB PET/CT, reducing the radiation burden for young or pregnant patients, who undergo multiple consecutive PET scans during their treatment for response assessment.

Mingels et al., J Nucl Med. 2025

In vivo voxel-wise positronium lifetime imaging of thyroid cancer using clinically routine I-124 PET/CT

Measuring the lifetime of orthopositronium (oPs) has emerged as a promising approach for assessing tumor microenvironment characteristics, leveraging the susceptibility of oPs lifetime to local molecular factors. This is the forst report of human in-vivo measurement of oPs lifetime with [ 124I]NaI using a commercial LAFOV PET/CT scanner. The voxel-wise oPs lifetime imaging is feasible, though with a high statistical uncertainty. Lesion-based measurements can yield satisfactory statistical precision even for small volumes.

Mercolli et al., EANM Innovation 2. 2026