Original article
Consideration of the Usefulness of 18F-FET Brain PET/CT in Brain Tumor Diagnosis
Kyu-Ho Yeon1, Jae-Kwang Ryu1,2
1Deparment of Nuclear Medicine, Asan Medical Center, Seoul, Korea
2Graduated School of Public Health, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
Correspondence to Jae Kwang Ryu, Department of Nuclear Medicine, Asan Medical Center, Olympic-ro 43-gil, Songpa-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea, Tel: +82-2-3010-5421, E-mail: huhjoon11@naver.com
Volume 28, Number 1, Article 7, May 2024. Korean J Nucl Med Technol 2024;28(1):7. https://doi.org/10.12972/kjnmt.20240007
Received on November 23, 2023, Revised on December 13, 2023, Accepted on December 23, 2023, Published on May 31, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Purpose: 18F-FET, a radiopharmaceutical based on a Tyrosine amino acid derivative using the Sodium-Potassium Pump-independent Transporter (System L) for non-invasive evaluation of primary, recurrent, and metastatic brain tumors, exhibits distinct characteristics. Unlike the widely absorbed 18F-FDG in both tumor and normal brain tissues, 18F-FET demonstrates specific uptake only in tumor tissue while almost negligible uptake in normal brain tissue. This study aims to compare and evaluate the usefulness of 18F-FDG and 18F-FET Brain PET/CT quantitative analysis in brain tumor diagnosis. Materials and Methods: In 46 patients diagnosed with brain gliomas (High Grade: 34, Low Grade: 12), Brain PET/CT scans were performed at 40 minutes after 18F-FDG injection and at 20 minutes (early) and 80 minutes (delay) after 18F-FET injection. SUVmax and SUVpeak of tumor areas corresponding to MRI images were measured in each scan, and the SUVmax-to-SUVpeak ratio, an indicator of tumor prognosis, was calculated. Differences in SUVmax, SUVpeak, and SUVmax-to-SUVpeak ratio between 18F-FDG and 18F-FET early/delay scans were statistically verified using SPSS (ver.28) package program. Results: SUVmax values were 3.72±1.36 for 18F-FDG, 4.59±1.55 for 18F-FET early, and 4.12±1.36 for 18F-FET delay scans. The highest SUVmax was observed in 18F-FET early scans, particularly in HG tumors (4.85±1.44), showing a slightly more significant difference (P<0.0001). SUVpeak values were 3.33±1.13 for 18F-FDG, 3.04±1.11 for 18F-FET early, and 2.80±0.96 for 18F-FET delay scans. The highest SUVpeak was in 18F-FDG scans, while the lowest was in 18F-FET delay scans, with a more significant difference in HG tumors (P<0.001). SUVmax-to-SUVpeak ratio values were 1.11±0.09 for 18F-FDG, 1.54±0.22 for 18F-FET early, and 1.48±0.17 for 18F-FET delay scans. This ratio was higher in 18F-FET scans for both HG and LG tumors (P<0.0001), but there was no statistically significant difference between 18F-FET early and delay scans. Conclusion: This study confirms the usefulness of early and delay scans in 18F-FET Brain PET/CT examinations, particularly demonstrating the changes in objective quantitative metrics such as SUVmax, SUVpeak, and introducing the SUVmax-to-SUVpeak ratio as a new evaluation metric based on the degree of tumor malignancy. This is expected to further contributions to the quantitative analysis of Brain PET/CT images.
Keywords
Brain tumor, 18F-FET, SUVmax-to-SUVpeak ratio