TH-E-202-01: Pitfalls and Remedies in PET/CT Imaging for RT Planning.

PET/CT is a very important imaging tool in the management of oncology patients. PET/CT has been applied for treatment planning and response evaluation in radiation therapy. This educational session will discuss: 1. Pitfalls and remedies in PET/CT imaging for RT planning 2. The use of hypoxia PET imaging for radiotherapy 3. PET for tumor response evaluation The first presentation will address the issue of mis-registration between the CT and PET images in the thorax and the abdomen. We will discuss the challenges of respiratory gating and introduce an average CT technique to improve the registration for dose calculation and image-guidance in radiation therapy. The second presentation will discuss the use of hypoxia PET Imaging for radiation therapy. We will discuss various hypoxia radiotracers, the choice of clinical acquisition protocol (in particular a single late static acquisition versus a dynamic acquisition), and the compartmental modeling with different transfer rate constants explained. We will demonstrate applications of hypoxia imaging for dose escalation/de-escalation in clinical trials. The last presentation will discuss the use of PET/CT for tumor response evaluation. We will discuss anatomic response assessment vs. metabolic response assessment, visual evaluation and semi-quantitative evaluation, and limitations of current PET/CT assessment. We will summarize clinical trials using PET response in guiding adaptive radiotherapy. Finally, we will summarize recent advancements in PET/CT radiomics and non-FDG PET tracers for response assessment.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES: 1. Identify the causes of mis-registration of CT and PET images in PET/CT, and review the strategies to remedy the issue. 2. Understand the basics of PET imaging of tumor hypoxia (radiotracers, how PET measures the hypoxia selective uptake, imaging protocols, applications in chemo-radiation therapy). 3. Understand the basics of dynamic PET imaging, compartmental modeling and parametric images. 4. Understand the basics of using FDG PET/CT for tumor response evaluation. 5. Learn about recent advancement in PET/CT radiomics and non-FDG PET tracers for response assessment. This work was supported in part by the National Cancer Institute Grants R01CA172638.; W. Lu, This work was supported in part by the National Cancer Institute Grants R01CA172638.