Abstract
Purpose
18F-fluorethyltyrosine-(FET)-PET and MRI-based relative cerebral blood volume (rCBV) have both been used to characterize gliomas. Recently, inter-individual correlations between peak static FET-uptake and rCBV have been reported. Herein, we assess the local intra-lesional relation between FET-PET parameters and rCBV.
Methods
Thirty untreated glioma patients (27 high-grade) underwent simultaneous PET/MRI on a 3 T hybrid scanner obtaining structural and dynamic susceptibility contrast sequences. Static FET-uptake and dynamic FET-slope were correlated with rCBV within tumour hotspots across patients and intra-lesionally using a mixed-effects model to account for inter-individual variation. Furthermore, maximal congruency of tumour volumes defined by FET-uptake and rCBV was determined.
Results
While the inter-individual relationship between peak static FET-uptake and rCBV could be confirmed, our intra-lesional, voxel-wise analysis revealed significant positive correlations (median r = 0.374, p < 0.0001). Similarly, significant inter- and intra-individual correlations were observed between FET-slope and rCBV. However, rCBV explained only 12% of the static and 5% of the dynamic FET-PET variance and maximal overlap of respective tumour volumes was 37% on average.
Conclusions
Our results show that the relation between peak values of MR-based rCBV and static FET-uptake can also be observed intra-individually on a voxel basis and also applies to a dynamic FET parameter, possibly determining hotspots of higher biological malignancy. However, just a small part of the FET-PET signal variance is explained by rCBV and tumour volumes determined by the two modalities showed only moderate overlap. These findings indicate that FET-PET and MR-based rCBV provide both congruent and complimentary information on glioma biology.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Daniela Hiob (Technical University of Munich) for the careful revision of the manuscript.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
Funding
This study was supported by funding from the German Research Foundation DFG (grant to CP, SF and TP: FO 886/1-1; PR 1039/4-1) and from the Faculty of Medicine of the Technical University of Munich (grant to TP: KKF B11-14; and to JGö: KKF E12).
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. BM and JGe report personal fees from Brain Lab AG, outside the submitted work.
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Göttler, J., Lukas, M., Kluge, A. et al. Intra-lesional spatial correlation of static and dynamic FET-PET parameters with MRI-based cerebral blood volume in patients with untreated glioma. Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging 44, 392–397 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-016-3585-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-016-3585-0