Baldwin reviews the properties of monoamine oxidase and applications of the deuterium isotope effect in dual-tracer PET imaging in a preview of an article in this month’s JNM.
Fowler and colleagues use PET to assess reductions in monoamine oxidase A in the peripheral organs of smokers and discuss the implications of their findings for understanding the neurophysiologic effects of smoking.
Grijm and colleagues evaluate the utility of semiquantitative 67Ga scintigraphy in predicting responsiveness to therapy with high-dose corticosteroids in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and fibrotic nonspecific interstitial pneumonia.
Johnson and Gould report on a novel method to quantify diffuse patchy heterogeneous resting myocardial perfusion during pharmacologic challenge stress with noninvasive cardiac PET and evaluate the method’s effectiveness as an early marker of coronary artery disease.
Eufrasia Vicario and colleagues assess the influence of conventional risk factors on coronary flow reserve as estimated by 99mTc-sestamibi cardiac imaging in patients with single-vessel coronary artery disease.
Sestini and colleagues report on a long-term follow-up study using regional cerebral blood flow SPECT to assess motor improvement derived from high-frequency deep brain stimulation of the sub-thalamic nucleus in patients with Parkinson’s disease.
Tran and colleagues compare 18F-FDG PET in primary tumor findings in patients with inner-quadrant breast cancers and those with outer-quadrant breast cancers and examine the implications of their findings for long-term prognosis.
Scher and colleagues detail the pattern of 18F-FDG uptake in primary penile cancer and its metastases and report on the diagnostic utility of 18F-FDG PET/CT in staging and restaging.
Staley and colleagues assess the feasibility and reproducibility of the bolus-plus-constant-infusion paradigm for equilibrium imaging with 123I-5-IA SPECT for measurement of β2-containing nicotinic acetylcholine receptors in the brains of healthy nonsmokers.
Ma and colleagues review the literature on and discuss possible explanations for discordant findings in serum thyroglobulin studies and 131I whole-body scanning, especially in patients monitored for recurrence of differentiated thyroid carcinoma.
Pan and colleagues explore the use of respiratory-averaged CT for attenuation correction of PET data and evaluate the technique’s ability to improve tumor quantification by eliminating breathing artifacts in PET imaging of the thorax.
Shekhar and colleagues report on a fully automated normalized mutual information–based 3-dimensional elastic image registration technique to align whole-body PET and CT images acquired on stand-alone scanners as well as PET/CT scanners.
Cot and colleagues apply a Monte Carlo code and phantom techniques in a novel method to provide accurate quantification of striatal uptake of radiolabeled dopamine transporter ligands in SPECT imaging.
Lundberg and colleagues investigate 11C-MADAM, a newly synthesized radioligand with high selectivity and specificity for serotonin transporters, in quantitative PET studies in humans, with attention to its potential for clinical studies in the pathophysiology and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders.
Stegger and colleagues describe a novel PET imaging method for monitoring left ventricular dilation in mice and compare the results with those from cardiac MRI.
Pellegrino and colleagues compare the imaging properties of 18F-FDG and 18F-FDG–labeled white blood cells in sterile and septic inflammation in rat models.
Lee and colleagues investigate the effects of anesthesia on 18F-FDG uptake in cultured cells and tumor-bearing mice after fasting, in an effort to explore whether significant changes in glucose turnover rates with anesthesia have confounding effects on PET imaging.
Wang and colleagues use 99mTc-sestamibi imaging to investigate whether systemic inflammation induced by Escherichia coli lipopolysaccharide affects P-glycoprotein function in the brain, heart, liver, and kidneys of rats and transplacental transport in pregnant rats.
van Eerd and colleagues describe the potential of 2 new hydrazinonicotinamide-conjugated compounds for visualizing and evaluating infection and inflammation in a rabbit model.
Line and colleagues evaluate the relative importance of specific targeting and non-specific vascular permeability in both tumor and normal tissues to understand factors important in the design of angiogenesis-targeting radiopharmaceuticals.
Storch and colleagues investigate several somatostatin analogs and radiopeptides and assess rates of pancreatic and tumor uptake to identify suitable candidates for clinical studies of targeted radionuclide therapy of somatostatin receptor–positive tumors.
ON THE COVER
Whole-body PET and CT images acquired on separate scanners are misregistered because of differences in patient positions and orientations, couch shapes, and breathing protocols. Although a combined PET/CT scanner removes many of these misalignments, breathing-related nonrigid mismatches still persist. The elastic registration algorithm corrects for nonrigid misalignments in whole-body PET/CT images and improves the mechanical registration of a combined PET/CT scanner. In these images, acquired using a combined scanner, the rectangular box and arrows highlight improved matching of corresponding areas after elastic registration. From top to bottom: original CT scan, original PET scan, PET scan after elastic registration, original PET/CT fused scan, and PET/CT fused scan after elastic registration.
