PET has the invaluable advantage of being intrinsically quantitative, enabling accurate measurements of tracer concentrations in vivo. In PET tumor imaging, indices characterizing tumor uptake, such as standardized uptake values, are becoming increasingly important, especially in the context of monitoring the response to therapy. However, when tracer uptake in small tumors is measured, large bi...

In positron emission tomography (PET), data is collected via the detection of photons emitted by a radioactive tracer within the subject. The noise in PET data is Poisson, and hence, it is typical to reconstruct the tracer density distribution via the computation of an approximate minimizer of the negative-log Poisson likelihood function. In this paper, we present an iterative method for the so...

Application of microfluidics to Positron Emission Tomography (PET) tracer synthesis has attracted increasing interest within the last decade. The technical advantages of microfluidics, in particular the high surface to volume ratio and resulting fast thermal heating and cooling rates of reagents can lead to reduced reaction times, increased synthesis yields and reduced by-products. In addition ...

In the last decade, positron emission tomography (PET) myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) has emerged as a valuable clinical tool for the management of patients with known or suspected coronary artery disease (CAD). Compared with singlephoton emission computed-tomography (SPECT), PET provides higher-quality images and superior diagnostic accuracy (1). Increased availability of PET scanners, Med...

Major progress has been made in the development and clinical application of dynamic imaging and tracer kinetic models to accurately measure absolute blood flow and coronary flow reserve (CFR) using quantitative positron emission tomography (PET) myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) in patients with known or suspected coronary artery disease (CAD).1–6 Assessing CFR provides significantly greater s...

INTRODUCTION Residual subclinical synovitis can still be present in joints of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients despite clinical remission and has been linked to ongoing radiological damage. The aim of the present study was to assess subclinical synovitis by positron emission tomography (PET; macrophage tracer (11)C-(R)-PK11195) in early RA patients with minimal disease activity without clinic...

There is great interest in positron emission tomography (PET) as a noninvasive assay of fluctuations in synaptic neurotransmitter levels, but questions remain regarding the optimal choice of tracer for such a task. A mathematical method is proposed for predicting the utility of any PET tracer as a detector of changes in the concentration of an endogenous competitor via displacement of the trace...

UNLABELLED Copper(II)-diacetyl-bis(N(4)-methylthiosemicarbazone) (copper-ATSM) is a hypoxia-avid tracer for the selective identification of hypoxic tissue. Using canine models of hypoxic myocardium, we report our findings on *Cu-ATSM PET (*Cu is defined as either (60)Cu, (61)Cu, or (64)Cu) for the delineation of ischemic and hypoxic myocardium. METHODS In protocol I, myocardial hypoxia was in...

INTRODUCTION The use of thymidine (TdR) and thymidine analogs such as 3'-fluoro-3'-deoxythymidine (FLT) as positron emission tomography (PET)-based proliferation markers can provide information on tumor response to treatment. Studies on another TdR analog, 4'-thiothymidine (4DST), suggest that it might be a better PET-based proliferation tracer than either TdR or FLT. 4DST is resistant to the c...

The standard template provided with the statistical software package SPM’99 was originally developed for O-H2O PET scans in resting condition with eyes closed. This template is commonly applied regardless of the tracer actually used in the scans being analyzed. This work studies the effect of three different normalization templates in the outcome of the statistical analyses of PET scans, as com...