Li Zekun, Benabdallah Nadia, Thorek Daniel L J, Jha Abhinav K
ArXiv. 2024 Mar 25:arXiv:2403.17226v1.
SPECT can enable the quantification of activity uptake in lesions and at-risk organs in {\alpha}-particle-emitting radiopharmaceutical therapies ({\alpha}-RPTs). But this quantification is challenged by the low photon counts, complicated isotope physics, and the image-degrading effects in {\alpha}-RPT SPECT. Thus, strategies to optimize the SPECT system and protocol designs for the task of regional uptake quantification are needed. Objectively performing this task-based optimization requires a reliable (accurate and precise) regional uptake quantification method. Conventional reconstruction-based quantification (RBQ) methods have been observed to be erroneous for {\alpha}-RPT SPECT. Projection-domain quantification methods, which estimate regional uptake directly from SPECT projections, have demonstrated potential in providing reliable regional uptake estimates, but these methods assume constant uptake within the regions, an assumption that may not hold. To address these challenges, we propose WIN-PDQ, a Wiener-estimator-based projection-domain quantitative SPECT method. The method accounts for the heterogeneity within the regions of interest while estimating mean uptake. An early-stage evaluation of the method was conducted using 3D Monte Carlo-simulated SPECT of anthropomorphic phantoms with radium-223 uptake and lumpy-model-based intra-regional uptake heterogeneity. In this evaluation with phantoms of varying mean regional uptake and intra-regional uptake heterogeneity, the WIN-PDQ method yielded ensemble unbiased estimates and significantly outperformed both reconstruction-based and previously proposed projection-domain quantification methods. In conclusion, based on these preliminary findings, the proposed method is showing potential for estimating mean regional uptake in {\alpha}-RPTs and towards enabling the objective task-based optimization of SPECT system and protocol designs.
单光子发射计算机断层扫描(SPECT)能够对发射α粒子的放射性药物治疗(α-RPTs)中病变和高危器官的活性摄取进行定量分析。但这种定量分析面临着低光子计数、复杂的同位素物理特性以及α-RPT SPECT中的图像退化效应等挑战。因此,需要采取策略来优化SPECT系统以及针对区域摄取定量任务的协议设计。客观地执行基于任务的优化需要一种可靠(准确且精确)的区域摄取定量方法。已观察到传统的基于重建的定量(RBQ)方法在α-RPT SPECT中存在误差。投影域定量方法直接从SPECT投影估计区域摄取,已证明在提供可靠的区域摄取估计方面具有潜力,但这些方法假定区域内摄取恒定,这一假设可能不成立。为应对这些挑战,我们提出了WIN-PDQ,一种基于维纳估计器的投影域定量SPECT方法。该方法在估计平均摄取时考虑了感兴趣区域内的异质性。使用具有镭-223摄取和基于块状模型的区域内摄取异质性的人体模型的三维蒙特卡罗模拟SPECT对该方法进行了早期评估。在对具有不同平均区域摄取和区域内摄取异质性的模型进行的评估中,WIN-PDQ方法产生了无偏差的总体估计,并且显著优于基于重建的方法和先前提出的投影域定量方法。总之,基于这些初步发现,所提出的方法在估计α-RPTs中的平均区域摄取以及实现基于任务的SPECT系统和协议设计的客观优化方面显示出潜力。