ASL-incorporated pharmacokinetic modelling of PET data with reduced acquisition time: Application to amyloid imaging

Pharmacokinetic analysis of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) data typically requires at least one hour of image acquisition, which poses a great disadvantage in clinical practice. In this work, we propose a novel approach for pharmacokinetic modelling with significantly reduced PET acquisition time, by incorporating the blood flow information from simultaneously acquired arterial spin labelling (ASL) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). A relationship is established between blood flow, measured by ASL, and the transfer rate constant from plasma to tissue of the PET tracer, leading to modified PET kinetic models with ASL-derived flow information. Evaluation on clinical amyloid imaging data from an Alzheimer’s disease (AD) study shows that the proposed approach with the simplified reference tissue model can achieve amyloid burden estimation from 30 min [18F]florbetapir PET data and 5 min simultaneous ASL MR data, which is comparable with the estimation from 60 min PET data (mean error=−0.03). Conversely, standardised uptake value ratio (SUVR), the alternative measure from the data showed a positive bias in areas of higher amyloid burden (mean error=0.07).