Respiration-Averaged CT for Attenuation Correction of PET Images – Impact on PET Texture Features in Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Patients

PURPOSE We compared attenuation correction of PET images with helical CT (PET/HCT) and respiration-averaged CT (PET/ACT) in patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) with the goal of investigating the impact of respiration-averaged CT on 18F FDG PET texture parameters. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 56 patients were enrolled. Tumors were segmented on pretreatment PET images using the adaptive threshold. Twelve different texture parameters were computed: standard uptake value (SUV) entropy, uniformity, entropy, dissimilarity, homogeneity, coarseness, busyness, contrast, complexity, grey-level nonuniformity, zone-size nonuniformity, and high grey-level large zone emphasis. Comparisons of PET/HCT and PET/ACT were performed using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, intraclass correlation coefficients, and Bland-Altman analysis. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves as well as univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses were used to identify the parameters significantly associated with disease-specific survival (DSS). A fixed threshold at 45% of the maximum SUV (T45) was used for validation. RESULTS SUV maximum and total lesion glycolysis (TLG) were significantly higher in PET/ACT. However, texture parameters obtained with PET/ACT and PET/HCT showed a high degree of agreement. The lowest levels of variation between the two modalities were observed for SUV entropy (9.7%) and entropy (9.8%). SUV entropy, entropy, and coarseness from both PET/ACT and PET/HCT were significantly associated with DSS. Validation analyses using T45 confirmed the usefulness of SUV entropy and entropy in both PET/HCT and PET/ACT for the prediction of DSS, but only coarseness from PET/ACT achieved the statistical significance threshold. CONCLUSIONS Our results indicate that 1) texture parameters from PET/ACT are clinically useful in the prediction of survival in NSCLC patients and 2) SUV entropy and entropy are robust to attenuation correction methods.