Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a valuable investigative method for the evaluation of new drugs and therapeutic approaches in oncology.

PET is a very complex imaging modality with many potential sources of human, technical and biological variation/error that can reduce the accuracy and precision of the results of an individual scan. The greater this variation is across all the scans contributing to a given study, the lower the statistical power of the study becomes and the harder it is to detect an effect.

The UK PET Core Lab based at St Thomas’ Hospital has been established to co-ordinate a network of accredited PET centres using commonly agreed standards to deliver high quality PET data for multicentre cancer clinical trials.