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This Article Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Deleye, S. Articles by Lemahieu, I. PubMed Articles by Deleye, S. Articles by Lemahieu, I.

Use of a human PET/CT and MR for a rat staging study

¹ UGent-IBBT, Gent, Belgium; ² UGent, Gent, Belgium

2110

Objectives: Small animal imaging studies are preferably acquired by nuclear medicine cameras tailored for small animals. However this dedicated small animal apparatus is not always mandatory. The presented study shows a follow-up of rats which were inoculated with tumour cells. This was done to have an idea of the tumour lifespan in order to get a correct timing for treatment with paclitaxel which is a drug used for intracavitary chemotherapy in rats with peritoneal carcinomatosis. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the image quality achievable with available clinical human equipment.

Methods: The tumour growth of three rats was followed by the administration of 18F-FDG. PET/CT imaging was performed 5 times with 3-4 days intervals on a human scanner. The injected activity ranged from 400 to 1300 µCi and emission times varied from 15 to 22 min and data was therefore corrected with a scaling factor. To visualize the changes over time we created a virtual slice presenting maximum values along the axis perpendicular to the coronal plane. For quantitative analysis we first used a moving average filter to reduce the noise. Regions of interest (ROI)were created around the heart and the tumour and the ratios of the maxima of these ROIs were calculated. A knee RF-coil was used in a human MR to measure the size of the tumours (T2, ±15 min). The anaesthesia included isoflurane during PET/CT imaging and xylazine was used in combination with ketamine prior to MR scanning.

Results: We were able to pinpoint the stage of tumour signal decrease. Sensitivity, spatial resolution and acquisition times were suboptimal but acceptable.

Conclusions: This study showed that a small animal scanner is not always mandatory. We could clearly see the signal and volume decrease in a rat tumour staging experiment on a human PET/CT and MR respectively.

This Article Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Deleye, S. Articles by Lemahieu, I. PubMed Articles by Deleye, S. Articles by Lemahieu, I.