A Simple Evaluation of the Benefit of Combined Kinetic Analysis of Multiple Injection Dynamic PET Scans

The multiple injection dynamic Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanning is used in the clinical management of certain groups of cancer patients and in medical research. The analysis of such studies can be approached in one of two ways: analyze individual injections separately to recover tracer kinetic information, or concatenate data from separate injections and carry out a combined analysis. Separate analysis offers some simplicity but may not be as efficient statistically. The mixture technique is readily implemented in a separated or combined analysis mode. We evaluate these approaches in a 1-D simulation setting matched to the mathematical complexity of PET. These simulations are largely guided by experience with breast cancer flow-metabolism mismatch studies using ¹⁵O-Water (H2O) and ¹⁸F-Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG). An efficient implementation in the R (an open-source environment) is used to implement simulations. The simulations evaluate mean square error (MSE) characteristics, for separate and combined analysis, both as a function of dose. The relationship between MSE characteristics of the underlying source distribution is described and the combined analysis is found to reduce MSE by between 18.1% and 33.85%. The quantitative advantages of combined approach have been demonstrated.