Wh. Wong et K. Hicks, A CLINICALLY PRACTICAL METHOD TO ACQUIRE PARAMETRIC IMAGES OF UNIDIRECTIONAL METABOLIC RATES AND BLOOD SPACES, The Journal of nuclear medicine, 35(7), 1994, pp. 1206-1212
As SPECT imaging has become more quantitative with the advent of the a
ttenuation correction, SPECT parametric imaging can become a reality i
f the data acquisition and the numeric reduction procedures can be sim
plified. Methods: A method that is clinically practical for acquiring
quantitative parametric images of unidirectional metabolic rate consta
nts and apparent blood space is proposed. Its application to PET imagi
ng with FDG was investigated. This procedure requires a short postinje
ction waiting period, three sequential imaging scans and one blood sam
ple (1 ml) during each scan, obviating the requirements of continuous
blood sampling, ''assumed'' rate constants (autoradiographic method) a
nd difficult nonlinear regression computations. The effect of the earl
y-phase blood input function is computed directly from the image. The
clinical procedure is completed 1 hr after FDG injection. The computat
ion time for generating 21 metabolic rate image slices and blood space
slices is negligible (30 sec after image reconstruction). Preliminary
human studies on brain, heart, liver and tumor were performed. Result
s: The method was tested on seven normal subjects. The results showed
that the rapidly changing early-phase blood input can be derived from
the raw image and that the metabolic rate images of this method agreed
with the results from the graphical analysis method, using continuous
sampling, and with published data from three-compartment models. Conc
lusion: This study is clinically more practical and computationally si
mpler as a method to acquire parametric images of the metabolic rate c
onstant, K-i, and the apparent blood space V-d for unidirectional trac
ers. Applying this simple quantitative parametric imaging method to ro
utine clinical studies may improve the accuracy of routine clinical ev
aluations.