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Is there already value in "total body PET" imaging in neurology?
Alexander Hammers1,2,3
1King' College London & Guy's and St Thomas' PET Centre, School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine, King's College London, London SE1 7EH, United Kingdom.
None:
"Total Body" PET (TBP) represents a step change for all of PET, and brain imaging is no exception. Multiple benefits are already being seen. Lower injected doses benefit patients and staff and facilitate multitracer research. Shortened acquisition times for suitable radiopharmaceuticals enable better patient comfort and reduce the need for general anesthesia in children (albeit then partially negating the dose benefit). Later scanning enabled by the higher sensitivity palliates restrictions in tracer availability and allows better modeling. The large axial field-of-view enables better quantification via assessment of intravascular radioactivity concentrations. Early short-frame dynamic scanning has already enabled obtaining quantitative brain perfusion measurements for several radiopharmaceuticals. The large field-of-view allows assessment of brain-body interactions and multiorgan repercussions of disease. Despite some technical and methodological challenges remaining, TBP already offers added value in brain imaging, with exciting times ahead.
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