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Introduction

It has become widely recognized, that besides qualitative imaging the absolute quantification of tissue parameters is essential for the understanding of biological systems. One of the gold standard methods in quantification is PET which has sensitivity down to the picomolar range and a unique specifity due to the targeting by molecular probes. Quantitative PET requires the measurement of the arterial input function (AIF), the unchanged radiotracer in arterial plasma, and modeling of the tissue response measured in the PET image.

Swisstrace has developed the "twilite" sampler for the online monitoring of the tracer concentration in whole blood. The design of the system was optimized for animal and human research using PET. The twilite has been proven to feature excellent sensitivity, linearity and signal-to-noise, even in the presence of significant external radiation, resulting in whole blood radioactivity curves with high temporal resolution. An experimental setup using an arteriovenous shunt allows acquiring arterial input curves without blood loss in rodents [1].

PMOD's PSAMPLE software is the acquisition software of the twilite, and supports the correction and calibration of the count data for accurately measuring the whole blood tracer activity concentration. It can be easily forwarded into PMOD's kinetic tool for the metabolite correction. The resulting AIF is subsequently be used for modeling purposes in the PKIN and PXMOD quantification tools.