Dr. Michael McCarthy:

There is clear data on the effectiveness of treatments commenced within a certain timeframe. The main value of a PET scan is that, when you are planning an aggressive and usually curative treatment for a patient, you do not want to put somebody through a treatment with that level of toxicity if their cancer is more advanced than we realised from other cross-sectional imaging. In that context, it is clear. I treat head, neck and cervical cancer myself and two common curative modalities for those cancers are concurrent chemo-radiotherapy. It would be better for the patients if, when the multidisciplinary team was planning care for individual patients, we knew we could get access to a PET scan within a week or two as opposed to the typical waiting time of four to six weeks.