This Month in JNM

October 1, 2018

Women, nuclear medicine, and cancer risk: Siegel and colleagues critique assumptions behind a recent article in the radiology literature on risks associated with nuclear medicine radiation doses in women. Page 1489

Right-to-Try Law: Brown and colleagues review the pros and cons of this 2018 legislation allowing use of experimental, non-FDA–approved drugs as a last resort for those unable to participate in clinical testing and with no remaining treatment options. Page 1492

Dosimetry relevance: Lassmann and Eberlein provide an overview of the most recent developments in state-of-the-art equipment for dosimetry in radionuclide therapies, including calibration methods for imaging, small-scale dosimetry, and limitations of patient-specific dosimetry. Page 1494

Radiometals for PET: Brandt and colleagues present the second in a series of continuing education reviews, focusing here on general aspects of radiometal-based PET radiotracers and the most frequently applied metallic PET radionuclides: ⁶⁸Ga, ⁸⁹Zr, and ⁶⁴Cu. Page 1500

Biodistribution reporting: Kesner and Bodei provide a brief communication emphasizing the importance of treating biodistribution measurements as a valuable part of dosimetry work that is worthy of robust documentation. Page 1507

¹³¹I SPECT/CT in PTMC follow-up: Spanu and colleagues assess the diagnostic role of ¹³¹I SPECT/CT in detecting metastases in patients with papillary thyroid microcarcinomas over the course of long-term follow-up. Page 1510

¹⁸F-FDHT PET/CT reproducibility: Vargas and colleagues describe PET/CT reproducibility and repeatability with this radiolabeled analog of the androgen receptor’s primary ligand in men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Page 1516

PET response, skeletal lesions, and pediatric HL: Georgi and colleagues explore the suitability of current ¹⁸F-FDG PET response criteria for skeletal involvement in Hodgkin lymphoma and compare initial uptake intensity/metabolic tumor volumes with PET response after 2 cycles of chemotherapy. Page 1524

Imaging CAR T cells with ⁸⁹Zr-oxine: Weist and colleagues optimize ⁸⁹Zr-oxine labeling of chimeric antigen receptor T cells and evaluate PET as a platform for imaging adoptively transferred CAR T cells. Page 1531

SHBG and ¹⁸F-FDHT accumulation: Larimer and colleagues elucidate the role of the sex hormone–binding globulin in developing a model of rodent androgen receptor PET imaging, with a goal of noninvasively interrogating androgen expression over time in murine models. Page 1538

Dexamethasone and NSCLC: McHugh and colleagues assess the potential of ¹⁸F-FLT PET monitoring of dexamethasone-mediated S-phase suppression in non–small cell lung cancer as a means to individualize pemetrexed chemotherapy. Page 1544

Imaging melphalan therapy response: Hathi and colleagues determine the utility of ⁸F-FDOPA, which mediates uptake of melphalan (a small-molecule DNA-alkylating agent), for imaging melphalan therapy response in a preclinical model of multiple myeloma. Page 1551

Preclinical ¹⁸F-FLT and ¹⁸F-ICMT-11 PET: Heinzmann and colleagues evaluate these tracers in detection of early treatment-induced changes in tumor biology and determine whether these changes indicate a response to cetuximab administered as monotherapy or in combination with gemcitabine. Page 1558

FEATURED CLINICAL INVESTIGATION ARTICLE QoL and PRRT for NETs: Martini and colleagues evaluate quality-of-life factors in patients with gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors from first peptide-receptor radionuclide therapy to first restaging and compare resulting scores with general population norms. Page 1566

Simplified dynamic ¹²³I-MIBG SPECT: Wu and colleagues report on a simplified quantification method for dynamic ¹²³I-MIBG SPECT using practical protocols with shortened acquisition times and voxel-by-voxel parametric imaging. Page 1574

¹¹C-PiB uptake in white matter^: Lowe and colleagues investigate the suitability of white matter as a PET reference region for amyloid-b deposition and identify factors affecting ¹¹C-Pittsburgh compound B uptake variability. Page 1583

Age-specific analysis of pediatric PET: De Blasi and colleagues describe a reliable observer-independent pipeline for analysis of pediatric ¹⁸F-FDG PET images as part of presurgical planning in epilepsy. Page 1590

¹¹C-BU99008 binding in human^s: Tyacke and colleagues characterize this PET radioligand that targets the imidazoline₂ binding site and assess its test–retest reproducibility for potential use in investigation of neurodegenerative and neuroinflammatory diseases. Page 1597

FEATURED ARTICLE OF THE MONTH ¹⁸F-XTRA human neuroimaging: Coughlin and colleagues detail the pharmacokinetic behavior of this new radiotracer for PET imaging of the a4b2 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, with a focus on extrathalamic regions of interest in which a4b2-nAChR density is lower. Page 1603

Modeling metoclopramide transport by ABCB1: Auvity and colleagues use kinetic modeling to develop simplified methods to quantify the impact of ATP-binding cassette transporter P-glycoprotein on blood–brain barrier influx and efflux of ¹¹C-metoclopramide in nonhuman primates. Page 1609

FEATURED BASIC SCIENCE ARTICLE Imaging liver lymphocytes: Salas and colleagues ask whether PET imaging with radiotracers that quantify immune activation (¹⁸F-FDG and ¹⁸F-FAC) and hepatocyte biology (¹⁸F-DFA) can visualize and quantify liver-infiltrating immune cells and hepatocyte inflammation in a preclinical model of autoimmune hepatitis. Page 1616

Deep learning and activity/attenuation maps: Hwang and colleagues describe deep convolutional neural network development to overcome current limitations of maximum-likelihood reconstruction of activity and attenuation and validate these in a clinical brain PET dataset. Page 1624

Joint reconstruction in TOF PET: Rezaei and colleagues validate reconstruction of time-of-flight PET data using joint maximum-likelihood activity reconstruction and attenuation registration in a whole-body patient dataset. Page 1630

Guidelines for pediatric diuresis renography: Majd and members of SNMMI and the European Association of Nuclear Medicine release updated procedural guidelines for diuresis renography in infants and children.  Page 1636