Pharmacokinetic modelling and adaptive design for regional tissue flow and extraction for preclinical PET/CT

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Preclinical Positron Emission Tomography/Computed Tomography (PET/CT) is a well-established non-invasive imaging tool for studying disease development and progression as well as for supporting the development of novel drugs. This project aims to develop and validate a new PET/CT biomarker for assessment of regional tissue perfusion changes, namely flow and extraction, based on 18F-NaF PET images. Perfusion can be measured as the rate at which the blood is delivered to the tissue. Relative perfusion assessments are often used for diagnosis and evaluation of treatment response of a number of cardiovascular and brain diseases. Unfortunately absolute quantification of perfusion in vivo and non-invasively remains challenging because tracer perfusion doesn't necessarily reflect blood perfusion. Recent pilot experiments have shown that better estimates of perfusion can be achieved via the use of different radiotracer delivery strategies. You will follow-up these experiments with data analysis and pharmacokinetic modelling to establish whether tracer flow can be separated from confounding effects and you will also use adaptive design to establish what is the ideal imaging, reconstruction and analysis protocol for achieving this separation.