A New Preclinical Decision Support System Based on PET Radiomics: A Preliminary Study on the Evaluation of an Innovative (64)Cu-Labeled Chelator in Mouse Models

The (64)Cu-labeled chelator was analyzed in vivo by positron emission tomography (PET) imaging to evaluate its biodistribution in a murine model at different acquisition times. For this purpose, nine 6-week-old female Balb/C nude strain mice underwent micro-PET imaging at three different time points after (64)Cu-labeled chelator injection. Specifically, the mice were divided into group 1 (acquisition 1 h after [(64)Cu] chelator administration, n = 3 mice), group 2 (acquisition 4 h after [(64)Cu]chelator administration, n = 3 mice), and group 3 (acquisition 24 h after [(64)Cu] chelator administration, n = 3 mice). Successively, all PET studies were segmented by means of registration with a standard template space (3D whole-body Digimouse atlas), and 108 radiomics features were extracted from seven organs (namely, heart, bladder, stomach, liver, spleen, kidney, and lung) to investigate possible changes over time in [(64)Cu]chelator biodistribution. The one-way analysis of variance and post hoc Tukey Honestly Significant Difference test revealed that, while heart, stomach, spleen, kidney, and lung districts showed a very low percentage of radiomics features with significant variations (p-value < 0.05) among the three groups of mice, a large number of features (greater than 60% and 50%, respectively) that varied significantly between groups were observed in bladder and liver, indicating a different in vivo uptake of the (64)Cu-labeled chelator over time. The proposed methodology may improve the method of calculating the [(64)Cu]chelator biodistribution and open the way towards a decision support system in the field of new radiopharmaceuticals used in preclinical imaging trials.