Repeatability of Radiotracer Uptake in Normal Abdominal Organs with ¹¹¹In-Pentetreotide Quantitative SPECT/CT

With an increasing emphasis on quantitation of SPECT imaging and its use in dosimetry to guide therapies, it is desirable to understand the repeatability in normal-organ SPECT uptake values (SPECT-UVs). We investigated the variability of normal abdominal organ uptake in repeated (111)In-pentetreotide SPECT studies.

Nine patients with multiple (111)In-pentetreotide SPECT/CT studies for clinical purposes were evaluated. Volumes of interest were drawn for the abdominal organs and applied to SPECT-UVs. The variability of those values was assessed.

The average SPECT-UV for the liver (1.7 ± 0.6) was much lower than for the kidneys (right, 8.0 ± 2.4; left, 7.5 ± 1.7). Interpatient and intrapatient variability was similar (intraclass correlation coefficients, 0.40-0.59) for all organs. The average coefficients of variation for each organ for each patient were obtained and averaged across all patients (0.26 for liver, 0.22 for right kidney, and 0.20 for left kidney). The coefficients of variation for the organs across all scans were 0.33 (liver), 0.30 (right kidney), and 0.22 (left kidney).

Variability across all patients and all scans for the liver was higher than reported with (18)F-FDG PET, though left kidney variability was similar to PET liver variability and left kidney uptake may be able to serve as an internal metric for determining the quantifiability of an (111)In-pentetreotide SPECT study.