Quantification of lung glucose metabolism with positron emission tomography in patients with Acute Lung Injury

Acute lung injury is lung pathologies that confer considerable morbidity and high mortality and has no specific treatment. One cause of ALI exacerbation can be the mechanical ventilation provided in the intensive care unit ICU probably because of neutrophils activation, that is the mainstay of inflammation. Since neutrophils activation is associated to an increase in cellular metabolism, FDG-PET studies could be suitable to describe the dynamic of lung inflammation. In the study we applied the Patlak graphical method and the data-driven methods to quantify glucose metabolism. We obtained a better classification of the level of inflammation in injured lungs than the standard approach based on CT and the quantification methods gave important indications about the number of compartments necessary to describe the FDG kinetic