Quantitative Assessment of Treatment Effects in Psoriasis Using FDG-PET/CT

• Activity Number: 441
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Imaging
• Author(s): Daniel Shin*+ and Russell Shinohara and Joel Gelfand and Abass Alavi and Ali Salavati
• Companies: University of Pennsylvania and University of Pennsylvania and University of Pennsylvania and University of Pennsylvania and University of Pennsylvania
• Keywords: imaging ; PET/CT imaging ; normalization ; segmentation

Abstract

Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory disease that affects 2-3% of the general population. With no biomarkers currently available to measure disease activity, assessment of psoriasis is limited to clinical measures of the skin. With recent studies demonstrating the use of 18F-FDG PET/CT in detecting treatment effects, a new placebo-controlled RCT is underway to assess the effect of biological therapy on systemic vascular inflammation compared to phototherapy or placebo. The Vascular Inflammation in Psoriasis (VIP) Trial is designed to assess changes in systemic inflammation between baseline and week 12 of therapy using FDG- PET. However, the standardized update value (SUV), the quantitative unit of FDG-PET, is subject to many potential sources of bias and variance, such as image physics, biological variability and scan protocol, which are inadequately addressed by current methods of analyses. Image normalization may offer robustness in estimation of disease activity and address these issues. We explore the quantification of treatment effects on disease activity of psoriatic skin using normalization, and address other statistical questions in the image-processing pipeline.