A method to estimate the input function non-invasively for neurologic FDG-PET studies

Positron emission tomography (PET) allows the in vivo measurement of cerebral glucose utilisation with [¹⁸F] fluorodeoxy-D-glucose (FDG) and is well accepted for the clinical evaluation of neurological disease. However, the insertion of arterial lines and the subsequent processing of the blood samples are believed to be inconvenient to clinical PET studies, as it is invasive to the subject and exposes personnel to the risks associated with the handling of patient blood and radiation dose. Here, the authors validate a technique that they proposed previously to estimate the input function together with the physiological parameters simultaneously from the brain dynamic images in conjunction with two or more late venous blood samples in human studies. The results of the human studies demonstrate that the input function can be recovered accurately and the parameter estimates are not statistically different from those estimated with the input function derived from arterial blood sampling