Abstract
Preclinical PET studies offer the opportunity to elucidate molecular mechanisms underlying early neurodevelopment with minimal invasiveness. We demonstrated the feasibility of fetal brain PET in four pregnant rats (n = 42 fetuses). [18F]FDG uptake in rat fetuses was readily visualized by PET imaging. Additionally, in vivo fetal brain [18F]FDG concentration (standardized uptake value (SUV)) was significantly correlated with ex vivo SUV from matched post-mortem brains (R2 = 0.90, p < 0.001). We further investigated the effect of the dopamine receptor antagonist haloperidol on cerebral glucose metabolism (CMRglu) and [11C]raclopride binding in maternal and fetal brains. Dopamine D2 receptor blockade by haloperidol resulted in significant decreases (p < 0.001, n = 33 vs 9 fetuses) in in vivo CMRglu and ex vivo [18F]FDG SUV. Consistently, haloperidol pretreatment significantly decreased [11C]raclopride SUV ratio (SUVR) by 17% (p < 0.001, n = 6 vs 6 fetuses) in the fetal whole-brain, using the maternal cerebellum as the reference region. In all, our results show that PET/CT imaging of the fetal rat brain can reliably quantify specific molecular targets in vivo, and future translational studies of neurodevelopment are feasible in this model.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
