[Estimation of the arterial blood radioactivity concentration using the whole body-to-arterial blood partition coefficients and the cross-calibration factor in 123I-iodoamphetamine SPECT--towards a noninvasive clinical protocol with the QSPECT-DTARG method].

The aim of this study is to develop a non-invasive procedure for quantitative assessment of regional cerebral blood flow using IMP and SPECT. A technique to utilize a population-based standardized arterial input function has been evaluated for the normal data base obtained from 3 institutions, which employed different SPECT device configurations. In total, data from 39 subjects were analyzed. Due to the unique feature of the QSPECT reconstruction software program, images are quantitative providing units of Bq/ml. Thus, the well counter values can be converted to absolute radioactivity concentration. The blood-to-whole-body average partition coefficient was 343.8 +/- 65.0 and did not show significant difference among the three institutions. The estimated blood counts agreed with those assessed by the well counter in all institutions, thus the arterial input function can be estimated with the unique conversion factor for all institutions. This feature may allow a large scale multi-center investigation, which may contribute to improve the non-invasive protocol.