De Luca Giulia M R, Habraken Jan B A
Department of Medical Physics, St. Antonius Hospital, Nieuwegein, The Netherlands.
EJNMMI Phys. 2022 Jun 6;9(1):40. doi: 10.1186/s40658-022-00470-2.
The Standardized Uptake Value (SUV) Max, SUVMean, and SUVPeak are metrics used to quantify positron emission tomography (PET) images. In order to assess the significance of a change in these metrics for diagnostic purposes, it is relevant to know their variation. The sources of variation can be biological or technical. In this study, we present a method to determine the statistical technical variation of SUV in PET images.
This method was tested on a NEMA quality phantom with spheres of various diameters with a full-length acquisition time of 150 s per bed position and foreground-to-background activity ratio of F-2-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose (FDG) of 10:1. Our method divides the 150 s acquisition into subsets with statistically independent frames of shorter reconstruction length. SUVMax, Mean and Peak were calculated for each reconstructed image in a subset. The coefficient of variation of SUV within each subset has been used to estimate the expected coefficient of variation at 150 s reconstruction length. We report the largest coefficient of variation of the SUV metrics for the smallest sphere and the smallest variation for the largest sphere. The expected variation at 150 s reconstruction length does not exceed 6% for the smallest sphere and 2% for the largest sphere.
With the presented method, we aim to determine the statistical technical variation of SUV. The method enables the evaluation of the effect of SUV metric choice (Max, Mean, Peak) and lesion size on the technical variation and, therefore, to evaluate its relevance on the total variation of the SUV value between clinical studies.
标准化摄取值（SUV）最大值、SUV均值和SUV峰值是用于量化正电子发射断层扫描（PET）图像的指标。为了评估这些指标变化对于诊断目的的意义，了解它们的变异性是相关的。变异性的来源可以是生物学的或技术的。在本研究中，我们提出了一种确定PET图像中SUV统计技术变异性的方法。
该方法在一个NEMA质量体模上进行了测试，该体模具有不同直径的球体，每个床位的全长采集时间为150秒，F-2-氟-2-脱氧-D-葡萄糖（FDG）的前景与背景活度比为10:1。我们的方法将150秒的采集分为具有统计独立的较短重建长度帧的子集。为子集中的每个重建图像计算SUV最大值、均值和峰值。每个子集中SUV的变异系数已用于估计150秒重建长度时的预期变异系数。我们报告了最小球体的SUV指标的最大变异系数和最大球体的最小变异系数。对于最小球体，150秒重建长度时的预期变异不超过6%，对于最大球体则不超过2%。
通过所提出的方法，我们旨在确定SUV的统计技术变异性。该方法能够评估SUV指标选择（最大值、均值、峰值）和病变大小对技术变异性的影响，从而评估其在临床研究之间SUV值总变异中的相关性。
