Reliable diagnosis of nigrostriatal degeneration by dopamine transporter SPECT despite drug interaction with venlafaxine or bupropion.

Purpose: This study examined the impact of venlafaxine and bupropion on the detection of nigrostriatal degeneration by dopamine transporter (DAT)-SPECT.

Methods: 43 patients (70.7 ± 8.

Incorporating label uncertainty during the training of convolutional neural networks improves performance for the discrimination between certain and inconclusive cases in dopamine transporter SPECT.

Purpose: Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) hold promise for assisting the interpretation of dopamine transporter (DAT)-SPECT. For improved communication of uncertainty to the user it is crucial to reliably discriminate certain from inconclusive cases that might be misclassified by strict application of a predefined decision threshold on the CNN output. This study tested two methods to incorporate existing label uncertainty during the training to improve the utility of the CNN sigmoid output for this task.

Brain perfusion SPECT in the presurgical evaluation of epilepsy: is additional ictal SPECT required in case of high-confidence lateralization of the seizure onset zone by interictal SPECT and vice versa?

Background: Ictal brain perfusion SPECT provides higher sensitivity for the identification of the epileptic seizure onset zone (SOZ) than interictal SPECT. However, ictal SPECT is demanding due to the unpredictable waiting period for the next seizure to allow for ictal tracer injection. Thus, starting with an interictal scan and skipping the ictal scan if the interictal scan provides a SOZ candidate with high confidence could be an efficient approach.

The Early Perfusion Image Is Useful to Support the Visual Interpretation of Brain Amyloid-PET With 18F-Flutemetamol in Borderline Cases.

Purpose: Visual interpretation of brain amyloid-β (Aβ) PET can be difficult in individuals with borderline Aβ burden. Coregistration with individual MRI is recommended in these cases, which, however, is not always available. This study evaluated coregistration with the early perfusion frames acquired immediately after tracer injection to support the visual interpretation of the late Aβ-frames in PET with 18F-flutemetamol (FMM).

Organ and tumor dosimetry including method simplification for [Lu]Lu-PSMA-I&T for treatment of metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer.

Background: Internal dosimetry in individual patients is essential for safe and effective radioligand therapy. Multiple time point imaging for accurate dosimetry is time consuming and hence can be demanding for nuclear medicine departments as well as patients. The objectives of this study were (1) to assess absorbed doses to organs at risk and tumor lesions for [Lu]Lu-PSMA-I&T using whole body SPECT imaging and (2) to investigate possible simplified dosimetry protocols.