Table 1 Progress indicators of methodological and commercial efforts towards improving key imaging technologies and widening their applications in clinical cancer care. System costs relate to costs of manufacturing a next-generation imaging system. Reproducibility relate to efforts made towards increasing reported accuracy of imaging results from the same system generation and across different platforms. Absolute quantification stands for means to extract absolute numeric values from image-based measurements. Radiation exposure describes exposure of subjects to ionizing radiation (or other means of energy deposit, such as in case of MRI). Examination time describes duration that subjects need to remain motionless in an imaging platform for the acquisition to take place. Spatial resolution is the measured resolution of the images. System sensitivity relates to both volumetric sensitivity of an imaging system and diagnostic sensitivity through the use of alternative tracer and contrast applications. The direction of the progress indicators, as relative metrics, corresponds to the consensus of the authors regarding the progress being made in any of these efforts within the next 5 years, or so

From: What scans we will read: imaging instrumentation trends in clinical oncology