Radiopharmaceuticals development for positron emission tomography lung function assessment

The ventilation/perfusion (V/Q) single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is a baseline protocol to diagnose pulmonary embolism. As compared with SPECT, positron emission tomography (PET) have technical advantages. It's now possible to perform V/Q imaging with PET technology using the same carrier molecule (e.g. macroagregated albumin (MAA) for perfusion imaging and aerosolized carbon nanoparticles for ventilation imaging) as V/Q SPECT substituting the technetium-99m (^99mTc) with the gallium-68 (⁶⁸Ga). The aim of this work was to develop radiopharmaceuticals to perform V/Q PET in order to facilitate the V/Q PET implementation in nuclear medicine department. According to literature data, a fully automated process to produce GMP [⁶⁸Ga]Ga-MAA for clinical use was developed in the first experimental part of this work. Then, the physical properties of ⁶⁸Ga-carbon nanoparticles were studied and compared to the literature data for ^99mTc-carbon nanoparticles. To finish, the radiation exposure to nuclear medicine technologists performing a V/Q PET was measured. This work has shown that carrier molecules used for V/Q SPECT were suitable for V/Q PET by substituting ^99mTc with ⁶⁸Ga. Moreover, it has been shown that V/Q PET was easy to implement in nuclear medicine department as it was demonstrated by ongoing clinical trials in our nuclear medicine department. (author)