Purpose

In the past years it has become obvious that besides qualitative imaging the absolute quantification of tissue parameters is essential for the understanding of biological systems. One of the gold standard methods in quantification is PET which has sensitivity down to the picomolar range and a unique specifity due to the targeting by molecular probes.

Quantitative PET requires the measurement of the arterial input function (AIF), the unchanged radiotracer in arterial plasma, and modeling of the tissue response measured in the PET image. The joint use of swisstrace's twilite system and PMOD's PSAMPLE software allows the accurate measurement of the whole blood tracer activity, which can be converted into plasma activity by a metabolite correction process. The resulting AIF can subsequently be used for modeling purposes in PMOD's different quantification tools such as PKIN and PXMOD.