But despite its great progress over the past years, China still lags behind developed countries, not only in the number of PET devices in use, but also in manufacturing ability, Tian says.

China has only a few hundred of PET devices, while in the US, the number is thousands, and China cannot produce some of the machines' key components, which have to be imported.

As a university teacher, Tian also feels compelled to broaden students' horizons, making use of her overseas experience and networking.

She teaches English-language courses, and often invites internationally acclaimed scientists to the university to lectures and academic conferences, such as the soon-to-open Hangzhou International Molecular Imaging Conference 2016.

Tian became interested in nuclear medicine when she was at Shanxi Medical University in the early 1990s. There she received the bachelor's and master's degrees.

Her performance during an academic meeting in Xi'an, Shaanxi province in 1999 impressed Endo Keigo, a world-leading expert in nuclear medicine and PET and professor of Gunma University in Japan. He then invited her to apply for the university's doctorate program.

At that time, PET was such a new medical technology that there were less than 100 PET machines in the world, and the Japanese university was among the best institutes in PET research and application.