Identifying the individual metabolic abnormities from a systemic perspective using whole-body PET imaging

Area of Science:

• Nuclear medicine
• Systems biology
• Medical imaging

Background:

• Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a powerful non-invasive imaging tool widely used in oncology, neurology, and cardiology.
• While effective for focal diseases, PET's potential for detecting systemic abnormalities has been limited due to the lack of total-body imaging capabilities until recently.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a framework for constructing individual metabolic abnormality networks using whole-body 18F-FDG PET imaging.
• To evaluate the framework's ability to detect systemic and organ-level metabolic deviations in patients with various conditions.

Main Methods:

• Utilized whole-body 18F-FDG SUV images from subjects.
• Developed a framework to construct metabolic abnormality networks by comparing individual data to a normal control database.
• Validated the framework in patients with lung cancer, post-COVID-19, and unexplained gastrointestinal bleeding.

Main Results:

• The framework successfully identified systemic and organ-level deviations from healthy controls.
• Altered network edge strengths indicated abnormal metabolic connections between organs.
• Network node deviations strongly correlated with organ SUV measures, characterizing glucose metabolism connectivity at the individual level.

Conclusions:

• The proposed framework advances PET imaging for systemic metabolic dysfunction analysis.
• Further research is needed to understand the biological mechanisms and physiological interpretations of identified interregional connections.