A personal acquisition time regimen of (68)Ga-DOTATATE total-body PET/CT in patients with neuroendocrine tumor (NET): a feasibility study

BACKGROUND: The injection activity of tracer, acquisition time, patient-specific photon attenuation, and large body mass, can influence on image quality. Fixed acquisition time and body mass related injection activity in clinical practice results in a large difference in image quality. Thus, this study proposes a patient-specific acquisition time regimen of (68) Ga-DOTATATE total-body positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET/CT) to counteract the influence of body mass (BM, kg) on image quality, and acquire an acceptable and constant image of patients with neuroendocrine tumors (NETs). METHODS: The development cohort consisting of 19 consecutive patients with full activity (88.7–204.9 MBq, 2.0 ± 0.1 MBq/kg) was to establish the acquisition time regimen. The liver SNR (signal-to-noise ratio, SNR(L)) was normalized (SNR(norm)) by the product of injected activity (MBq) and acquisition time (min). Fitting of SNR(norm) against body mass (BM, kg) in linear correlation was performed. Subjective assessment of image quality was performed using a 5-point Likert scale to determine the acceptable threshold of SNR(L), and an optimized acquisition regimen based on BM was proposed, and validated its feasibility through the validation cohort of 57 consecutive NET patients with half activity (66.9 ± 11.3 MBq, 1.0 ± 0.1 MBq/kg) and a fixed acquisition time regimen. RESULTS: The linear correlation (R(2) = 0.63) between SNR(norm) and BM (kg) was SNR(norm) = -0.01*BM + 1.50. The threshold SNR(L) of acceptable image quality was 11.2. The patient-specific variable acquisition time regimen was determined as: t (min) = 125.4/(injective activity)*(-0.01*BM + 1.50)(2). Based on that proposed regimen, the average acquisition time for acceptable image quality in the validation cohort was 2.99 ± 0.91 min, ranging from 2.18 to 6.35 min, which was reduced by 36.50% ~ 78.20% compared with the fixed acquisition time of 10 min. Subjective evaluation showed that acceptable image quality could be obtained at 3.00 min in the validation group, with an average subjective score of 3.44 ± 0.53 (kappa = 0.97, 95% CI: 0.96 ~ 0.98). Bland–Altman analysis revealed good agreement between the proposed regimen and the fixed acquisition time cohort. CONCLUSION: A patient-specific acquisition time regimen was proposed in NET patients in development cohort and validated its feasibility in patients with NETs in validation cohort by (68) Ga-DOTATATE total-body PET/CT imaging. Based on the proposed regimen, the homogenous image quality with optimal acquisition time was available independent of body mass. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40644-022-00517-8.