The Relationship Among Glucose Metabolism, Cerebral Blood Flow, and Functional Activity: a Hybrid PET/fMRI Study

¹⁸F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) estimate brain activities from different aspects, including regional glucose uptake (rGU) by ¹⁸FDG-PET, regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) by arterial spin labeling, and dynamic changes of deoxyhemoglobin by blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). However, the relationships between them remain incompletely understood. In the current study, twenty-four subjects (14 males, 10 females) were recruited and investigated the correlation among rGU, rCBF, and BOLD fMRI-derived metrics reflecting the neural activity, including amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF), regional homogeneity (ReHo), and degree centrality (DC) by hybrid PET/fMRI. Correlation analyses were performed across subject and across space at both voxel level and region level, considering partial volume effects by adjusting for gray matter volume. Each pair of metrics showed significant across-space correlations. rGU against ReHo showed the highest mean correlation coefficients. rGU had higher correlations with three resting-state (RS) fMRI metrics than did ASL-rCBF. However, the across-subject correlations were not significant among functional modalities (rGU, rCBF, and RS-fMRI BOLD data) at either voxel level or region level even with a liberal threshold, except for significant across-subject correlation between RS-fMRI metrics (ALFF, ReHo, and DC). These comprehensive findings from hybrid PET/MR might provide complementary information to reveal the underlying mechanisms of the brain activity and open new perspective to interpret pathologic conditions.