Exact Parameter Identification in PET Pharmacokinetic Modeling Using the Irreversible Two Tissue Compartment Model

This work is concerned with the identifiability of metabolic parameters from multi-region measurement data in quantitative PET imaging. It shows that, for the frequently used two-tissue compartment model and under reasonable assumptions, it is possible to uniquely identify metabolic tissue parameters from standard PET measurements, without the need of additional concentration measurements from blood samples. This result, which holds in the idealized, noiseless scenario, indicates that costly concentration measurements from blood samples in quantitative PET imaging can be avoided in principle. The connection to noisy measurement data is made via a consistency result, showing that exact reconstruction is maintained in the vanishing noise limit. Numerical experiments with a regularization approach are further carried out to support these analytic results in an application example.