CSL has continued its support of the Nuclear Medicine Department by assessing their changing and expanding processing needs and translating these into computer requirements that are anticipated to grow 10- to 30-fold over the next few years. This year Nuclear Medicine installed two multislice Positron emission tomography (PET) systems for a total of three, and added a third single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) system. Nuclear Medicine now has brought online two in-house cyclotrons for generating various isotopes for PET systems. Last year a Request for Proposals (RFP) for a department-wide computer system was released. This year a contract was negotiated and signed to provide data processing capabilities for both the routine clinical activities and a multitude of research projects. The initial system was installed, which consisted of data acquisition systems (DAS's) that are connected via a network to a large host system. The DAS's will be used for acquisition and processing of routine clinical studies and the host will eventually be used for central storage and display and will provide the computer processing capabilities needed for the research activities.
