A bootstrap method for a totally non-invasive input function and pharmacokinetic parameters estimation in 18F-FDG PET images of the human brain

摘要

The pharmacokinetics extracted from PET images in the brain is relied to the physiological mechanisms that describe the processing of the tracer by the brain structures. These processes can be described through a multi-compartments model detailing the different states of the tracer and the transfer rate between these states. Numerous work have been proposed for the estimation of the input function (IF) from the internal carotids in the brain, but these methods are not able to extract efficiently the individual parameters of the model [1]. Feng et al. [2] have proposed a method for the simultaneous estimation of the input function (IF) and of the pharmacokinetic parameters (PK). This method takes as input a set of N Time Activity Curves (TAC), each related with a distinct structure of interest. This method may be applied to other compounds than FDG [3], but since it is highly sensitive to the noise that affects the input TACs, it has to resort to venous blood sampling.