5C Network Launches Remote Nuclear Medicine Centre to Plug India's Radiologist Gap

India has more PET-CT scanners than it has people qualified to read their scans, and the gap is widening rather than closing. 5C Network, the Bengaluru-based AI-native radiology platform, launched a remote Centre of Excellence for Nuclear Medicine on September 23, 2026, betting that AI-assisted, centralised reporting can stretch a scarce specialist pool across a country that is buying imaging hardware faster than it is training people to interpret it.

The shortage, in numbers

5C Network's own figures frame the problem starkly. India has roughly 500 PET-CT installations and 350 SPECT/gamma cameras in operation nationwide, but only about 800 nuclear medicine physicians to read the scans they produce. That specialist pool is growing by only around 40 new physicians a year, while scan volumes are rising at roughly 13% annually — a widening gap that leaves many scanners in smaller cities sitting idle for lack of anyone qualified to interpret their output, even as demand for cancer and cardiac imaging grows. 5C estimates the addressable market at close to 7,500 PET-CT studies a day nationally, most of it currently unmet.

What the Centre of Excellence actually does

Rather than trying to train nuclear medicine physicians faster — a multi-year fix — 5C's model routes scans electronically from a hospital's own scanner to a network of credentialed specialists anywhere in the country, standardising how those reads are structured along established criteria such as PERCIST, Lugano, PSMA-RADS and SSTR-RADS. Layered on top is 5C's existing Bionic AI suite of computer-vision and clinical-language models, which the company says assists with lesion tracking, standardised uptake value (SUV) quantification, and treatment-response assessment — narrowing what a remote physician needs to review manually rather than replacing their judgment.

The initial rollout is targeted at Tier-2 and Tier-3 hospitals and mid-sized imaging centres — exactly the facilities most likely to own a PET-CT machine but lack an on-staff nuclear medicine physician — with 5C describing plans for eventual international expansion once the domestic model is proven out.

Who's running it

Dr Ajit Shinto has been appointed to head the Centre of Excellence. He brings more than two decades in nuclear medicine, has personally reported over 30,000 studies, commissioned India's first digital PET-CT scanner, and has previously built out nuclear medicine departments at multiple hospital systems — the kind of specialist credibility 5C needs to get hospital administrators and referring oncologists comfortable routing scans to a remote reader they've never met in person.

"India has the scanners but not enough physicians to read them, and it cannot add them fast enough," said 5C Network CEO Kalyan Sivasailam. "A Centre of Excellence is how you make scarce expertise travel."

5C Network's broader position

Founded in 2017, 5C Network processes more than 10,000 radiology reports a day across X-ray, CT, MRI and now nuclear medicine through its Borderless Radiology service, drawing on a panel of more than 450 radiologists — a scale that puts it among the largest digital radiology reporting operations in the world by daily report volume, not just in India. The company's backers include Celesta Capital, Capria Ventures, Tata 1mg, Axilor Ventures and IIMA Ventures. The nuclear medicine launch extends a model 5C has already proven in general radiology — centralising scarce specialist attention and using AI as a triage and consistency layer — into a sub-specialty where the physician shortage is proportionally even more acute than in general radiology.

Why this matters beyond one company

India's medical-device regulator finalised guidance in mid-2026 treating AI-based cancer-detection software that analyses X-rays, CT and MRI scans as Class C medical devices, formalising a regulatory path for exactly the kind of AI decision-support tools 5C is deploying here. That regulatory clarity, combined with a physician shortage that cannot be solved through training pipelines on any near-term timeline, is likely to push more of India's diagnostic imaging — not just nuclear medicine — toward centralised, AI-assisted remote-reading models over the next several years. Nuclear medicine, with its combination of expensive equipment, a tiny specialist pool and standardised international reporting criteria, is simply the sub-specialty where that pressure has become impossible to ignore first.

What to watch

5C has not disclosed how many hospitals have committed to routing scans through the new Centre of Excellence at launch, nor what the platform charges per study. The more telling early signal will be whether Tier-2 and Tier-3 hospitals that currently let PET-CT machines sit idle for lack of a reader actually adopt the remote-reporting workflow at scale, and whether India's Class C regulatory framework for AI-based image analysis creates friction or clears a path as 5C's nuclear medicine AI tools move from lesion-tracking assistance toward a larger role in the reporting pipeline.

Sources

• 5C Network Launches AI-Integrated Centre of Excellence for Nuclear Medicine to Bridge India's Cancer Diagnostics Deficit — Business News This Week
• 5C Network Launches AI-Integrated Centre of Excellence for Nuclear Medicine — PrimeView
• About 5C Network — AI Native Radiology Platform