4D SPECT/CT acquisition for 3D dose calculation and dose planning in (177)Lu-peptide receptor radionuclide therapy: applications for clinical routine.

Molecular radiotherapy combines the potential of a specific tracer (vector) targeting tumor cells with local radiotoxicity. Designing a specific tumor-targeting/killing combination is a tailoring process. Radionuclides with imaging capacity serve best in the selection of the targeting molecule. The potential of targeted therapy with radiolabeled peptides has been reported in many conditions; peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT) is already part of Scandinavian guidelines for treating neuroendocrine tumors. Lu-177- and Y-90-labeled somatostatin analogs, including DOTATOC, DOTANOC, and DOTATATE, are most the commonly used and have turned out to be effective. For routine use, an efficient, rapid, and reliable dose calculation tool is needed. In this chapter we describe how serial pre- and posttherapeutic scans can be used for dose calculation and for predicting therapy doses. Our software for radionuclide dose calculation is a three-dimensional, voxel-based system. The 3D dose calculation requires coregistered SPECT image sets from several time points after infusion to reconstruct time-activity curves for each voxel. Image registration is done directly by SPECT image registration using the first time point as a target. From the time-activity curves, initial activity and total half-life maps are calculated to produce a cumulated activity map. The cumulated activity map is then convoluted with a voxel-dose kernel to obtain a 3D dose map. We performed dose calculations similarly for both therapeutic and preplanning images. Preplanning dose was extrapolated to predict therapy dose using the ratio of administered activities. Our 3D dose calculation results are also compared with those of OLINDA. Our preliminary results indicate that dose planning using pretherapeutic scanning can predict critical organ and tumor doses. In some cases, the dose planning prediction resulted in slight, and slightly dose-dependent, overestimation of final therapy dose. Real tumor dose was similar in both pretherapeutic and posttherapeutic scans using our software. The OLINDA software and our program gave similar normal organ doses, whereas tumor doses could be calculated in a more detailed manner using the 3D program.