Aim: Parkinson’s disease related pattern (PDRP) is a metabolic brain network characteristic for Parkinson's disease (PD). It is identified with statistical analysis of PD patients’ brain images acquired with 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) and positron emission tomography (PET). PDRP is an imaging biomarker of disease process in PD. PDRP expression can be determined prospectively for each individual patient. The aim of our study was to explore whether a type of FDG PET image reconstruction algorithm affects the PDRP expression.
Study design, methods and participants: Brain scans of a Slovenian cohort of 40 PD patients, 40 healthy control (HC) participants and 25 patients with atypical parkinsonism (AP) were acquired with FDG PET at Department of nuclear medicine of University Medical Centre Ljubljana (UMCL), using Biograph mCT scanner. An American cohort of 20 PD patients and 7 HC subjects was scanned at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research (FIMR) using GE Advance camera. Images of 20 Slovenian PD patients and 20 HC were used to identify a Slovenian PDRP(SLOV) with Scaled Subprofile Model/Principal Component Analysis (SSM/PCA). Other images were used for PDRP(SLOV) validation, performed by testing discrimination between subject groups based on the expression of PDRP(SLOV) and correlation between expressions of PDRP(SLOV) and PDRP(FIMR). Afterwards we explored the effect of various PET image reconstruction algorithms on the expression of PDRP(SLOV) and PDRP(FIMR). We studied the following reconstruction algorithms: analytical FBP (Filtered Backprojection), FBP+TOF (TOF = Time of flight), 3DRP (3D Reprojection), FORE-FBP (FORE = Fourier rebinning) and iterative OSEM (Ordered Subset Expectation Maximization), OSEM+TOF, OSEM+PSF (PSF = Point Spread Function), OSEM+PSF+TOF, FORE-Iterative.
Results: We determined metabolic brain network PDRP(SLOV), characterized by relative hypermetabolism in pallidum, putamen, thalamus, brain stem, cerebellum and sensory-motor cortex, associated with relative hypometabolism in posterior parietal, occipital and frontal cortex. PDRP(SLOV) discriminates PD, AP and HC subjects (p<0.001). PDRP(SLOV) and PDRP(FIMR) expression correlation (r=0.977, p<0.001) implies very good similarity between the brain networks. We confirmed significant correlation of PDRP expression between the reference and other reconstruction algorithms (r≥0.993, p<0.0001).
Conclusions: We identified PDRP(SLOV) and showed that its expression reliably discriminated PD patients from HC and AP subjects. PDRP(SLOV) has good similarity to the original PDRP(FIMR). We confirmed that different types of PET reconstruction algorithms have no significant impact on the expression of PDRP. Our work will contribute to implementation of this imaging biomarker in clinical and research applications worldwide.
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