Kinetic analysis of 3'-deoxy-3'-fluorothymidine PET studies: validation studies in patients with lung cancer.

Abstract

Compartmental analysis of FLT PET image data yielded robust estimates of K(FLT) that correlated with in vitro measures of tumor proliferation. This method can be applied generally to other imaging studies of different cancers after validation of parameter error. Tumor loss of phosphorylated FLT nucleotides (k(4)) is notable and leads to errors when FLT uptake is evaluated using model-independent approaches that ignore k(4), such as graphical analysis or the SUV.