The role of endoplasmic reticulum in in vivo cancer FDG kinetics

A recent result obtained by means of an in vitro experiment with cancer cultured cells has configured the endoplasmic reticulum as the preferential site for the accumulation of 2-deoxy-2-[18F]fluoro-D-glucose (FDG). Such a result is coherent with cell biochemistry and is made more significant by the fact that the reticular accumulation rate of FDG is dependent upon extracellular glucose availability. The objective of the present paper is to confirm in vivo the result obtained in vitro concerning the crucial role played by the endoplasmic reticulum in FDG cancer metabolism. This study utilizes data acquired by means of a Positron Emission Tomography scanner for small animals in the case of CT26 models of cancer tissues. The recorded concentration images are interpreted within the framework of a three-compartment model for FDG kinetics, which explicitly assumes that the endoplasmic reticulum is the dephosphorylation site for FDG in cancer cells. The numerical reduction of the compartmental model is performed by means of a regularized Gauss-Newton algorithm for numerical optimization. This analysis shows that the proposed three-compartment model equals the performance of a standard Sokoloff's two-compartment system in fitting the data. However, it provides estimates of some of the parameters, such as the phosphorylation rate of FDG, more consistent with prior biochemical information. These results are made more solid from a computational viewpoint by proving the identifiability and by performing a sensitivity analysis of the proposed compartment model.