Spectral Analysis of Dynamic PET Studies: A Review of 20 Years of Method Developments and Applications

Figure 2

Example of spectral analysis quantification. (a) Representative kinetic spectrum: out of the three spectral components reported, one corresponds to the tracer trapping (red) while the remaining ones refer to two equilibrating components at different frequencies (green and blue). (b) In this example the measured tracer activity (open circles) is described by the sum of the time-activity curves of each individual component of the spectrum (red, green, and blue dashed lines) resulting in the SA data model prediction (grey line). It is important to note that different positions of the components in the spectrum correspond to different shapes of time-activity curves, with the wash-out being slower for low-frequency spectral components and faster for the high-frequency ones.

(a) Kinetic spectrum

(b) SA data description