Quantitative PET in the 2020s: a roadmap.

Journal: Physics in medicine and biology
Published Date: Mar 12, 2021

Abstract

Positron emission tomography (PET) plays an increasingly important role in research and clinical applications, catalysed by remarkable technical advances and a growing appreciation of the need for reliable, sensitive biomarkers of human function in health and disease. Over the last 30 years, a large amount of the physics and engineering effort in PET has been motivated by the dominant clinical application during that period, oncology. This has led to important developments such as PET/CT, whole-body PET, 3D PET, accelerated statistical image reconstruction, and time-of-flight PET. Despite impressive improvements in image quality as a result of these advances, the emphasis on static, semi-quantitative 'hot spot' imaging for oncologic applications has meant that the capability of PET to quantify biologically relevant parameters based on tracer kinetics has not been fully exploited. More recent advances, such as PET/MR and total-body PET, have opened up the ability to address a vast range of new research questions, from which a future expansion of applications and radiotracers appears highly likely. Many of these new applications and tracers will, at least initially, require quantitative analyses that more fully exploit the exquisite sensitivity of PET and the tracer principle on which it is based. It is also expected that they will require more sophisticated quantitative analysis methods than those that are currently available. At the same time, artificial intelligence is revolutionizing data analysis and impacting the relationship between the statistical quality of the acquired data and the information we can extract from the data. In this roadmap, leaders of the key sub-disciplines of the field identify the challenges and opportunities to be addressed over the next ten years that will enable PET to realise its full quantitative potential, initially in research laboratories and, ultimately, in clinical practice.

Authors

  • Steven R Meikle
    Sydney School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Australia.
  • Vesna Sossi
    Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
  • Emilie Roncali
    Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Davis, United States of America.
  • Simon R Cherry
  • Richard Banati
    Sydney School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Australia.
  • David Mankoff
    Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, United States of America.
  • Terry Jones
    Department of Radiology, University of California, Davis, United States of America.
  • Michelle James
    Department of Radiology, Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford (MIPS), CA, United States of America.
  • Julie Sutcliffe
    Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Davis, United States of America.
  • Jinsong Ouyang
    Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, United States of America.
  • Yoann Petibon
    Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, United States of America.
  • Chao Ma
  • Georges El Fakhri
  • Suleman Surti
    Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, United States of America.
  • Joel S Karp
    Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, United States of America.
  • Ramsey D Badawi
    Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Davis, United States of America.
  • Taiga Yamaya
    National Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS), National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology (QST), Chiba, Japan.
  • Go Akamatsu
    National Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS), National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology (QST), Chiba, Japan.
  • Georg Schramm
    Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
  • Ahmadreza Rezaei
    Department of Imaging and Pathology, Division of Nuclear Medicine, KU/UZ Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
  • Johan Nuyts
    Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
  • Roger Fulton
    Brain and Mind Centre, The University of Sydney, Australia.
  • Andre Kyme
    School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
  • Cristina Lois
    Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, United States of America.
  • Hasan Sari
    Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States of America.
  • Julie Price
    Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States of America.
  • Ronald Boellaard
    Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Cancer Center Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Medical Centers, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
  • Robert Jeraj
  • Dale L Bailey
    Sydney School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health, The University of Sydney, Australia.
  • Enid Eslick
    Department of Nuclear Medicine, Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney, Australia.
  • Kathy P Willowson
    Department of Nuclear Medicine, Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney, Australia.
  • Joyita Dutta

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