EURADOS Report 2025-01 published: "Participation of EURADOS WG13 in the AAPM TACTIC Grand Challenge: Contribution to TAC Curve Fitting in Nuclear Medicine Dosimetry"
EURADOS Report 2025-01 is published: "Participation of EURADOS WG13 in the AAPM TACTIC Grand Challenge: Contribution to TAC Curve Fitting in Nuclear Medicine Dosimetry"
Vladimir Spielmann, Ziyi Hu, László Mázik, Balázs Madas, Wei Bo Li
Abstract: On January 19, 2023, AAPM opened the TACTIC Grand Challenge for pre-registration. The TACTIC Grand Challenge organized the competition into three distinct phases, Phase 0, Phase 1 and Phase 2 with defined time frames, each designed to address key challenges in the field of nuclear medicine and radiopharmaceutical therapy. The three phases were structured as follows. Phase 0 was an optional warm-up exercise. Participants as team might select between 1 and 5 time points from a synthetic predefined dataset of 140 time points < 140 hours post injection of [177Lu]Lu-PSMA. Participants should fit the time-activity curve (TAC) function that best represents the given data points, calculate the time-integrated activity (TIA) values based on each fitted TAC function. In Phase 1, participants might download the same predefined set of time-activity data corresponding to a clinical data acquisition scheme, consisting of 5 time points for 3 organs (blood, tumor and kidneys) for 5 patients (other than those used in Phase 0). Participants should perform fitting the TAC function that best represents the given data points, calculate the TIAC values based on each fitted TAC function. In Phase 1, individual curve-fitting techniques were mainly applied. In Phase 2, participants as teams might download the same predefined set of time-activity data corresponding to a clinical data acquisition scheme, consisting of 5 time points for 3 organs (blood, tumor and kidneys) for 15 additional patients (other than those used in Phase 1). Participants should fit the TAC functions that best represent the given data points, however applying the state-of-the-art population-based curve-fitting techniques. EURADOS Working Group (WG) 13 registered as one of the teams with the name EURADOS and participated in all three phases of the challenges. In Phase 0, EURADOS team achieved the best performer position. In Phase 1, EURADOS has mainly learned the techniques, how to treat the data at the time point zero. In Phase 2, EURADOS reached the third position with the best place in the competition in curve fitting for kidneys. Throughout the participation and performance in the challenges, the team EURADOS gained experience in many theoretical and technical methods for curve fitting in nuclear medicine, especially in the radiopharmaceutical therapy. These methods can be combined with individual and population compartmental modelling in the WG13 project and tasks.
