An automatic delineation method for bone marrow absorbed dose estimation in (89)Zr PET/CT studies

BACKGROUND: The study aims to develop and validate an automatic delineation method for estimating red bone marrow (RM) activity concentration and absorbed dose in (89)Zr positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) studies. Five patients with advanced colorectal cancer received 37.1 ± 0.9 MBq [(89)Zr] cetuximab within 2 h after administration of a therapeutic dose of 500 mg m(−2) unlabelled cetuximab. Per patient, five PET/CT scans were acquired on a Gemini TF-64 PET/CT scanner at 1, 24, 48, 96 and 144 h post injection. Low dose CT data were used to manually generate volumes of interest (VOI) in the lumbar vertebrae (LV). In addition, LV VOI were generated automatically using an active contour method in a low dose CT. RM activity was then determined by mapping the low dose CT-derived RM VOI onto the corresponding PET scans. Finally, these activities were used to derive residence times and, subsequently, the self and total RM absorbed doses using OLINDA/EXM 1.1. RESULTS: High correlations (r(2) > 0.85) between manual and automated VOI methods were obtained for both RM activity concentrations and total absorbed doses. On average, the automatic method provided values that were lower than 5 % compared to the manual method. CONCLUSIONS: An automated and efficient VOI method, based on an active contour approach, was developed, enabling accurate estimates of RM activity concentrations and total absorbed doses. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40658-016-0149-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.