With rare exceptions only a fraction of the tracer in blood is exchangeable with tissue and thus needs to be determined from blood aliquots which are withdrawn from an artery during the whole study.
A whole blood sample comprises tracer in the red blood cells and different tracer categories in the plasma: free tracer, tracer bound to plasma proteins, tracer chemically changed by metabolite processes (metabolites). Depending on the tracer ligand, exchange processes are continuously going on between the different tracer pools in blood.
Blood Sample Analysis
The following blood analysis steps are required in quantitative PET studies to determine the free tracer in plasma as the Arterial Input Function (AIF).
After the different tracer fractions in blood have been separated, it is necessary to calculate their activity concentrations. This is done by measuring them in a radioactivity counter and dividing the activity by the fractional volumes.
Fitting of Blood Curves by Models
Due to the experimental procedures involved the blood activity measurements are typically noisy and contribute a considerable amount of uncertainty to the analysis. Therefore it is often reasonable to fit analytical functions to the blood-related measurements, which is also applied for the interpolation between the samples, as well as for the extrapolation at late times when blood samples might be lacking.
The example below illustrates the blood model approach.
Note the sharp concentration changes at the early times after injection. To capture these changes adequately, rapid blood sampling is required during the first minutes after tracer injection.