Nucl Med Mol Imaging.
2019 Jun;53(3):182-188. 10.1007/s13139-019-00589-8.
Quantitative Imaging of Alpha-Emitting Therapeutic Radiopharmaceuticals
- Affiliations
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- 1Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA. youngho.seo@ucsf.edu
- 2Department of Radiation Oncology, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA.
- 3Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA.
- 4UC Berkeley – UCSF Bioengineering Graduate Program, Berkeley and San Francisco, CA, USA.
- 5Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA.
- 6UCSF Physics Research Laboratory, 185 Berry Street, Suite 350, San Francisco, CA 94143-0946, USA.
- KMID: 2450008
- DOI: http://doi.org/10.1007/s13139-019-00589-8
Abstract
- Targeted alpha therapy (TAT) is an active area of drug development as a highly specific and highly potent therapeutic modality that can be applied to many types of late-stage cancers. In order to properly evaluate its safety and efficacy, understanding biokinetics of alpha-emitting radiopharmaceuticals is essential. Quantitative imaging of alpha-emitting radiopharmaceuticals is often possible via imaging of gammas and positrons produced during complex decay chains of these radionuclides. Analysis of the complex decay chains for alpha-emitting radionuclides (Tb-149, At-211, Bi-212 (decayed from Pb-212), Bi-213, Ra-223, Ac- 225, and Th-227) with relevance to imageable signals is attempted in this mini-review article. Gamma camera imaging, single-photon emission computed tomography, positron emission tomography, bremsstrahlung radiation imaging, Cerenkov luminescence imaging, and Compton cameras are briefly discussed as modalities for imaging alpha-emitting radiopharmaceuticals.
