Application of radiation in medicine in Japan

Yanagisawa, Kazuaki; Inoue, Tomio*; Hayakawa, Kazushige*; Shiotari, Harutaka*; Nakamura, Yoshihide*; Matsuyama, Kazuya*; Nagasawa, Kiyoshi*

For Japan, application of radiation in nuclear medicine is prominently used for the diagnosis, the radiotherapy and the examination by radioisotopes (RI). They addressed to FDG-PET, charged particle therapy and BNCT at the specified hospitals. Incomes are reimbursed by a national health insurance. In 2005, reimbursed incomes at those hospitals were studied as an economic scale as a commissioned work from the Cabinet Office, Government of Japan. Results were directly compared with those from previous work done in 1997. The economic scale of the application of radiation to all medical reimbursement in our country is 14 billion dollars, which is larger by a factor of 17% than that of 1997. The value corresponds to about 4.8% of the national health expenditure (301billion dollars), consisting of 4.4% for medicine and 0.4% for dentistry.