Abstract
BackgroundIn vivo determination of regional pulmonary blood flow (PBF) is a valuable tool for the evaluation of many lung diseases. In this study, the use of 68Ga-DOTA PET for the in vivo quantitative determination of regional PBF is proposed. This methodology was implemented and tested in healthy pigs and validated using fluorescent microspheres. The study was performed on young large white pigs (n = 4). To assess the reproducibility and consistency of the method, three PET scans were obtained for each animal. Each radiotracer injection was performed simultaneously to the injection of fluorescent microspheres. PBF images were generated applying a two-compartment exchange model over the dynamic PET images. PET and microspheres values were compared by regression analysis and Bland–Altman plot.ResultsThe capability of the proposed technique to produce 3D regional PBF images was demonstrated. The correlation evaluation between 68Ga-DOTA PET and microspheres showed a good and significant correlation (r = 0.74, P < 0.001).ConclusionsAssessment of PBF with the proposed technique allows combining the high quantitative accuracy of PET imaging with the use of 68Ga/68Ge generators. Thus, 68Ga-DOTA PET emerges as a potential inexpensive method for measuring PBF in clinical settings with an extended use.
Highlights
In vivo determination of regional pulmonary blood flow (PBF) is a valuable tool for the evaluation of many lung diseases
Different imaging modalities have been suggested to accomplish this task like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) [1, 2], scintigraphy [3], single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) [4], computed tomography (CT) [5], or positron emission tomography (PET) [6, 7]
We have demonstrated the capability of the proposed technique to obtain in vivo 3D regional PBF
Summary
In vivo determination of regional pulmonary blood flow (PBF) is a valuable tool for the evaluation of many lung diseases. The use of 68Ga-DOTA PET for the in vivo quantitative determination of regional PBF is proposed. This methodology was implemented and tested in healthy pigs and validated using fluorescent microspheres. Determination of blood flow with PET using 15O-labeled water is considered the clinical standard [6, 8,9,10]. This technique has very low availability due to the short half-life of 15O (2.03 min) that requires an on-site cyclotron for its production [11]. Similar to gadolinium-chelated compounds used in MRI [13], a gallium-68-chelated compound has been suggested by Autio et al [14] to study blood flow in a preliminary study in rats
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