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According to the 22, in the year 2010, the market demand for medical imaging equipment in the United States will exceed US$16 billion, with an expected 6.8 percent annual growth from 2005. The report anticipates that CT scanners will lead the market growth. A recent report published by Global Industry Analysts, Inc. mentioned that at present the United States, Japan and Europe have the highest CT scanner installations.65 It was also reported that there has been a growing penetration of CT scanners among the developing countries, in which Asia Pacific particularly was reported to have the highest single-slice CT scanners reported a growing trend in deploying new and advanced imaging modalities in Asia. Multi-slice CT for example was noted in the report (2010) as becoming widespread in India. Another report by Electronics.ca Research Network (2008) states that Europe represents the largest market for 3D imaging applications and this market segment will be driven further by the continuous development of MRI, CT and Ultrasound. In 2007, the 49 published a report on the availability of advanced modalities such as CT and MRI across OECD countries for the year 2005. In the report, Japan was ranked as having the highest number of CT and MRI units per capita, followed by Australia for CT units and the United States for MRI units. Turkey, Hungary and Mexico were ranked the lowest. It was suggested that factors such as national income and total health spending could play a role in influencing the diffusion of these technologies. Figure 1, excerpted from the 49 report, shows the top ten countries for CT and MRI units per capita. To date, based on OECD Health Data 2010, it was further reported that between 2000 and 2008, there were more than doubled on average for MRI units per capita for OECD countries, in this case from 6 MRI units per million populations in 2000 to 13 in 2008.18 Japan, the United States, Italy and Greece were mentioned to have a greater number of MRI units per capita in comparison to other OECD countries. The number of CT scanners also increased from 19 per million populations in 2000 to 24 in 2008.

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