Welcome by Prof. Dr. Luc Mortelmans
Dear visitor,
First, I want to thank you for your kindness to visit our nuclear website. I'd like to welcome you in Leuven, an old medieval town where our university was founded in 1425, being one of the oldest in Europe. Our department belongs to an 1800 bed University hospital “UZ Gasthuisberg”, nearly 20 km from Brussels. In this busy hospital about 62.600 patients are hospitalized and 632.000 patients are on an outpatient basis per year.
As you will see during your travel through the website we are a large multidisciplinary family of 4 medical staff members, 5 radio pharmacists or chemists, 4 engineers/physicists, 23 technologists and 2 secretaries. This team is the mirror of a specialized university department where patient care, research and education have to be balanced. We are lucky to have the radio pharmacy group and the medical imaging group in the same department assuring an optimal integration.
We are performing about 15.000 diagnostic procedures per year : mainly skeletal scintigraphy (25%), PET oncology (28%), cardiology (10%), lung (8%) and brain scans (7%). All protocols and images are sent to other departments by a clinical workstation and a PACS system. All scintigraphic procedures are adapted to the rules of good clinical practice. In this context we obtained an EANM accreditation and ISO certification in 2005. As the first in Belgium, we installed a PET CT scanner with a clear impact on therapy monitoring and diagnostic performance. This scanner is also used to optimize radiotherapy planning. Radio immunotherapy with new labelled antibodies especially for lymphoma patients are tested out.
Besides patient care we try to find a perfect equilibrium with education and science. About 300 papers were published the last 5 years with our relative small academic staff. We obtained grants for more than 7 million Euros. To obtain an integrated clinical scientific department we founded a Molecular Imaging Research Center. This is a structural cooperation between nuclear medicine, radiology, radio pharmacy and medical imaging supporting fundamental research (early detection of pathologic processes) and also contract research concerning the development of new pharmaceuticals. In this context, a micro PET system (FOCUS system Concorde), a home-made microSPECT, a CCD camera and a micro-NMR system is available. "micro instrumentation is integrated in a dedicated imaging center called MoSAIC (Molecular Small Animal Imaging Center).To optimize the radio pharmacy department a new 18/9 MeV cyclotron is available since 2004 assuring radio pharmaceutical synthesis and labelling in concordance to “general manufacturing production” (GMP) rules. This optimalization will allow us to offer a quantified and legal platform for pharmaceutical industry and high quality patient care.
Concerning education, we have 4 clinical residents and also several medical doctorandi preparing a PhD thesis in oncology, neurology and cardiology. Also the group of radio pharmacy and medical physics has several PhD students. A full doctoral program is available for medical imaging. Students from whole the world are participating to this exciting program. Clinical training is legally accepted for citizens of Western Europe.
After you have read this introduction, I hope that one day we will have the honour to welcome you in Leuven to visit our department, to work together in the clinical or scientific world, or just to have a nice talk about our fascinating specialty. Afterwards we will be more than happy to offer you a nice dinner or drink in one of the “thousand pubs” of the charming city of Leuven.
Luc Mortelmans, MD, PhD
Head of Department
Dept. Nuclear Medicine
October 7, 2011
