Early-Phase 18F-Florbetapir and 18F-Flutemetamol Images as Proxies of Brain Metabolism in a Memory Clinic Setting

Alzheimer disease (AD) neuropathologic changes are 6-amyloid (A6) deposition, pathologic tau, and neurodegeneration. Dual-phase amy-loid PET might be able to evaluate A6 deposition and neurodegenera-tion with a single tracer injection. Early-phase amyloid PET scans provide a proxy for cerebral perfusion, which has shown good correla-tions with neural dysfunction measured through metabolic consump-tion, whereas the late frames depict amyloid distribution. Our study aimed to assess the comparability between early-phase amyloid PET scans and 18F-FDG PET brain topography at the individual level and their ability to discriminate patients. Methods: One hundred sixty-six subjects evaluated at the Geneva Memory Center, ranging from no cognitive impairment to mild cognitive impairment and dementia, underwent early-phase amyloid PET-using either 18F-florbetapir (eFBP) (n = 94) or 18F-flutemetamol (eFMM) (n = 72)-and 18F-FDG PET. A6 status was assessed. SUV ratios (SUVRs) were extracted to evaluate the correlation of eFBP/eFMM and their respective 18F-FDG PET scans. The single-subject procedure was applied to investigate hypometabolism and hypoperfusion maps and their spatial overlap by the Dice coefficient. Receiver-operating-characteristic analyses were performed to compare the discriminative power of eFBP/eFMM and 18F-FDG PET SUVR in AD-related meta-regions of interest between A6-negative healthy controls and cases in the AD continuum. Results: Positive correlations were found between eFBP/eFMM and 18F-FDG PET SUVR independently of A6 status and A6 radiotracer (R> 0.72, P< 0.001). eFBP/eFMM single-subject analysis revealed clusters of significant hypoperfusion with good correspondence to hypometabo-lism topographies, independently of the underlying neurodegenerative patterns. Both eFBP/eFMM and 18F-FDG PET SUVR significantly dis-criminated AD patients from controls in the AD-related meta-regions of interest (eFBP area under the curve [AUC], 0.888; eFMM AUC, 0.801), with 18F-FDG PET performing slightly better, although not sig-nificantly (all P values higher than 0.05), than others (18F-FDG AUC, 0.915 and 0.832 for subjects evaluated with eFBP and eFMM, respec-tively). Conclusion: The distribution of perfusion was comparable to that of metabolism at the single-subject level by parametric analysis, particularly in the presence of a high neurodegeneration burden. Our findings indicate that eFBP and eFMM imaging can replace 18F-FDG PET imaging, as they reveal typical neurodegenerative patterns or allow exclusion of the presence of neurodegeneration. The findings show cost-saving capacities of amyloid PET and support routine use of the modality for individual classification in clinical practice.

Automated summary

The study aimed to evaluate the comparability between early-phase amyloid PET scans and 18F-FDG PET brain topography at the individual level and their ability to differentiate patients. The results showed that early-phase amyloid PET scans and 18F-FDG PET SUVR had similar performances in diagnosing AD patients, and both were able to effectively distinguish AD patients from healthy controls. The findings demonstrate the cost-saving potential of amyloid PET and support the routine use of this modality for individual classification in clinical practice.