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Joint Regional Uptake Quantification of Thorium-227 and Radium-223 Using a Multiple-Energy-Window Projection-Domain Quantitative SPECT Method

Zekun Li, Nadia Benabdallah, Richard A. Laforest, Richard L. Wahl, Daniel L.J. Thorek, Abhinav K. Jha

IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2024

9 citations

Abstract

Thorium-227 ( )-based -particle radiopharmaceutical therapies ( -RPTs) are currently being investigated in several clinical and pre-clinical studies. After administration, decays to , another -particle-emitting isotope, which redistributes within the patient. Reliable dose quantification of both and is clinically important, and SPECT may perform this quantification as these isotopes also emit X- and -ray photons. However, reliable quantification is challenging for several reasons: the orders-of-magnitude lower activity compared to conventional SPECT, resulting in a very low number of detected counts, the presence of multiple photopeaks, substantial overlap in the emission spectra of these isotopes, and the image-degrading effects in SPECT. To address these issues, we propose a multiple-energy-window projection-domain quantification (MEW-PDQ) method that jointly estimates the regional activity uptake of both and directly using the SPECT projection data from multiple energy windows. We evaluated the method with realistic simulation studies conducted with anthropomorphic digital phantoms, including a virtual imaging trial, in the context of imaging patients with bone metastases of prostate cancer who were treated with -based -RPTs. The proposed method yielded reliable (accurate and precise) regional uptake estimates of both isotopes and outperformed state-of-the-art methods across different lesion sizes and contrasts, as well as in the virtual imaging trial. This reliable…

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