Comparison of ¹⁸F-FDGSUV, QSM and T2^*values between Parkinson’s disease and healthy controls from a single exam

Introduction: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders^1,2 mostly occurred in elderly people. Positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging are the two techniques that can detect brain function. While previous research normally use separate scans and MRI involves multiple sequences, the exam is normally time consuming. In an integrated PET/MR scanner together with advanced MRI techniques, the PET and multi-contrast MR images could be obtained simultaneously using one sequence, which is helpful to investigate the metabolism and neural activity of PD, without further image registration. In this study, we compared the standardized uptake value (SUV), quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) and T2^* values between PD and healthy controls (HC) from a single sequence PET/MR scan.

Methods: Eight PD patients and eight HC were participated in this study. Signed informed consent was obtained from each participant prior to study enrollment. The institutional ethics committee approved this study and all participants gave informed written consent. The data were collected on a 3.0 T PET/MR system (uPMR790, UIH, Shanghai, China) with 32 channel head coil. ¹⁸F-FDG PET and MULTIPLEX sequence were performed to generate SUV, QSM and T2^* images, together with anatomic T1w simultaneously. The substantia nigra was chosen as the region of interest (ROI) and the ROI of each participant was drawn on the workstation. Mean SUV, QSM and T2^* values of each ROI were obtained and t-tests were performed on the data. Moreover, the sex and age covariates were regressed out when doing t-tests.

Results: The example of ¹⁸F-FDG PET, QSM and T2^* images from a PD patient and HC were shown in Fig. 1 . As shown in Table 1, the SUV and T2^* values of PD were significantly lower than HC (p < 0.05) and the QSM values of PD were significantly higher than HC (p < 0.05). Conclusion: The ¹⁸F-FDG SUV, QSM and T2^* values showed significant difference between PD patients and HC, which suggested that these three parameters probably be biomarkers of PD. Integrated PET/MR with the advanced MR sequence allows to obtain these quantitative information from a single exam, which can be a useful technique to investigate the physiological and neural mechanism of PD.References:[1] Saeed U, Compagnone J, Aviv R I, et al. Imaging biomarkers in Parkinson’s disease and Parkinsonian syndromes: current and emerging concepts[J]. Translational neurodegeneration, 2017, 6(1): 8.[2] He R, Yan X, Guo J, et al. Recent advances in biomarkers for Parkinson’s disease[J]. Frontiers in aging neuroscience, 2018, 10: 305.

Fig. 1 A patient with Parkinson’s disease (A-C). A T2* map shows that signal intensities decrease in the substantia nigras; B QSM map shows that signal intensities increase in the substantia nigras; C ¹⁸F-FDG PET image shows that SUV decreases in the substantia nigras. A heanthy control (D-F). A T2* map; B QSM map; C ¹⁸F-FDG PET image.

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