Abstract
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Objectives Measurement of arterial input functions for use in PET kinetic modeling require invasive arterial blood sampling that is difficult for the patient and challenging for the imaging staff. This abstract examines the use of a detector device by Lucerno Dynamics, LLC for the purposes of collecting arterial input function information.
Methods Patients were seated in a standard injection chair. Detector elements were placed on the patient on the mid-bicepof the injection and opposing arm (control), as well as near the carotid artery. The device began collecting data 10 seconds prior to standard FDG injection. The patient remained seated in the injection chair for 3 minutes beforemoving to a standard holding room. The patient was held for 45 minutes before being called for their PET scan. The device was removed prior to exiting the holding room. Data from the device was temperature and decay corrected, then processed into time activity curves (TACs) and plotted for analysis.
Results The detector device was easy to attach to and remove from patients using standard medical tape or tegaderm. The portable nature of the device enabled movement from the injection chair to the holding room. The patient expressed no discomfort with the device during injection or uptake times. Analysis of TACs indicate the detector systems was able to measure regional activity. Curves for veinous and arterial inputs were as expected with rapid peaks within 15-20 seconds followed by exponential decay. Differences between veinous and arterial peak times (14 seconds) were consistent with typical transit times for normal patients.
Conclusions The presented device from Lucerno Dynamics, LLC, shows potential for use as a non-invasive method for determining arterial input functions for dynamic PET studies. This system may also obviate the need for "on the bed" injections and long 1 hour acquisitions to obtain image derived input functions. Further analysis is required to compare these methods with arterial blood sampling techniques.
Research Support Funding for this research comes from departmental funds from the Molecular Imaging and Translational Research Program in the Graduate School of Medicine at the University of Tennessee. The device is made available to the University of Tennessee through a research collaboration with Lucerno Dynamics, LLC.