Positron emission tomography of 5-HT reuptake sites in the human brain with C-11 McN5652 extraction of characteristic images by artificial neural network analysis

The goal of this work was to identify the distribution of serotonin transporters in the human brain with [11C](+)McN5652/PET. Four healthy volunteers were studied. To determine non-specific binding, a PET study was also performed with the inactive enantiomer [11C](-)McN5652 as well as with [11C](+)McN5652 after pretreatment with fluoxetine. For pattern extraction the PET data sets were analyzed by a back-propagation neural network. Two pharmacokinetic patterns and two characteristic images were separated; one representing specific binding, the other representing non-specific binding. The specific binding image showed characteristic distribution of serotonin transporters with [11C](+)McN5652. The pattern images demonstrated an improvement in image quality compared to the original PET images (reduced variance, higher region-to-cerebellum ratio, good correlation with known density of serotonin transporters). The non-specific binding images extracted from [11C](-)McN5652/PET were similar to those of [11C](-)McN5652 and [11C](-)McN5652 with fluoxetine. Thus, PET studies obtained with [11C](+)McN5652/largely represent the regional distribution of the serotonin transporters and the inactive enantiomer [11C](-)McN5652 shows the distribution of its nonspecific binding.