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The technical developments that have taken place in the preceding years (PET, hybrid imaging) have changed nuclear medicine. The future cooperation with radiologists will be challenging as well as positioning nuclear medicine in an European context. It can also be expected that education in nuclear medicine will undergo a harmonization process in the states of the European Union. In this paper, we describe how nuclear medicine education is organized in several European countries. We aim to stimulate constructive discussions on the future development of the specialization in nuclear medicine in Germany.

Introduction: The previously published European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) paediatric dosage card recommends 70 MBq F-18 or F-18 Fluoro-2-Deoxyglucose (F-18-FDG) as the "minimum recommended activity"., Discussion: Two recent publications demonstrate that when utilising F-18-labelled radiopharmaceuticals the administration of lower activities for small children is possible without losing image quality., Conclusion: In the light of these findings the EANM dosimetry and paediatrics committee have decided to reduce the value for the "minimum recommended activity" for both F-18 and F-18-FDG to 26 MBq for 2D- and 14 MBq for 3D-acquisitions.

Introduction: In a recent publication, Jacobs et al. proposed the use of three tracer-dependent dosage cards for paediatric nuclear medicine., Materials and Methods: Based upon this work, the EANM dosimetry and paediatrics committees introduce a condensed and revised version of this dosage card for major nuclear medicine paediatric diagnostic procedures, replacing the previous card by Piepsz et al. and including a set of minimum activities., Results: The activities to be administered result in weight-independent effective doses to the children. In addition, the introduction of minimum activities guarantees a minimum standard of image quality throughout Europe and avoids a variety of administered activities in children of the same weight in different countries, which was the case when using the previous EANM dosage card.

The purpose of these guidelines is to offer to the nuclear medicine team a framework that could prove helpful in daily practice. These guidelines contain information related to the indications, acquisition, processing and interpretation of 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (18F-FDG PET) in paediatric oncology. The Oncology Committee of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM) has published excellent procedure guidelines on tumour imaging with 18F-FDG PET (Bombardieri et al., Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging 30:BP115–24, 2003 []. These guidelines, published by the EANM Paediatric Committee, do not intend to compete with the existing guidelines, but rather aim at providing additional information on issues particularly relevant to PET imaging of children with cancer. The guidelines summarize the views of the Paediatric Committee of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine. They should be taken in the context of “good practice” of nuclear medicine and of any national rules, which may apply to nuclear medicine examinations. The recommendations of these guidelines cannot be applied to all patients in all practice settings. The guidelines should not be deemed inclusive of all proper procedures or exclusive of other procedures reasonably directed to obtaining the same results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]