Compartmental modeling and spectral analysis are often used for tracer kinetic modeling in positron emission tomography (PET). The concentrations in kinetic equations are usually considered to be instantaneous, whereas PET data are inherently integrated over time, which leads to uncertainties in the results. A new formalism for kinetic analysis that uses cumulative tracer concentrations and avoids approximating the image-derived input function and PET measurements with midframe instantanous values was developed. We assessed the improvements of the new formalism over the midframe approximation methods for three commonly used radiopharmaceuticals: [11C]raclopride, 2′-deoxy-2′-[18F]fluoro--glucose (FDG), and 3′-deoxy-3′-[18F]fluoro-thymidine (FLT). We found that improvements are case dependent and often not negligible. Improvements for determination of binding potential for [11C]raclopride ranged from 5% to 25%. Improvements in estimation accuracy of FDG and FLT microparameters ranged up to 25%. On the other hand, estimation of macroparameter Ki=K1k3/(k2+k3) for FDG or FLT did not show significant benefit with the new method; only modest improvement up to 2% was observed. Assessment of the benefits of using new method is far from being exhaustive, but possibly significant improvement was demonstrated. Therefore, we consider the proposed algorithm a necessary component of any kinetic analysis software.
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