Recommendations for Standardizing Nuclear Medicine Terminology and Data in the Era of Theranostics and Artificial Intelligence.

Journal: Journal of nuclear medicine : official publication, Society of Nuclear Medicine
Published Date: Jul 10, 2025

Abstract

There is a pressing need for improved standardization of terminology and data in nuclear medicine. The field is experiencing unprecedented growth, driven by advances in radiopharmaceutical therapy (RPT) and the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI). However, there are challenges that threaten to frustrate this continued progress. For instance, despite the successes of RPT, high-quality evidence on how to best personalize RPT and take full advantage of its theranostics properties is still lacking. To obtain this evidence, large, structured datasets are needed to associate different RPT strategies with patient outcomes. Large datasets are also needed for the development of AI algorithms, especially as new foundation models demand increasingly large training datasets. Both of these obstacles could be overcome by multiinstitutional data sharing. However, inconsistencies in terminology and data collection make effective data pooling difficult. This article, produced by the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging AI-Dosimetry Working Group, discusses the need for standardization in nuclear medicine terminology and data. We advocate for the adoption of standardized data and metadata frameworks based on controlled biomedical ontologies to better harmonize the collection of nuclear medicine data. We provide recommendations for the field that, if followed, would facilitate multiinstitutional data sharing and allow for the collection of large datasets. We describe a use case demonstrating how standardized vocabularies and data collection can enhance efforts to associate theranostics target expression data with patient outcomes.

Authors

  • Tyler J Bradshaw
    Department of Radiology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, United States of America.
  • Julia Brosch-Lenz
    Department of Integrative Oncology, BC Cancer Research Institute, 675 West 10th Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia V5Z 1L3, Canada.
  • Carlos Uribe
    Molecular Imaging and Therapy, BC Cancer, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
  • Nicolas Karakatsanis
    Translational and Molecular Imaging Institute (TMII), Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Department of Radiology, NY, USA; Division of Radio-pharmaceutical Sciences, Department of Radiology, Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University, NY, USA.
  • Richard Bruce
    Radiology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, United States of America.
  • Lidia Strigari
    IRCCS Azienda Ospedaliera Universitaria di Bologna, Medical Physics Department, Bologna, Italy. Electronic address: lidia.strigari@aosp.bo.it.
  • Abhinav Jha
    Department of Biomedical Engineering and Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri.
  • Joyita Dutta
  • Jazmin Schwartz
    Department of Medical Physics, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, New York.
  • Georges El Fakhri
  • Atlas Avval
    Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad, Iran.
  • Arman Rahmim
  • Babak Saboury
    IBM Research, Almaden, San Jose, California.

Keywords

No keywords available for this article.

External Resources

Popular Topics
Recent Journals