QPSMA: Semiautomatic software for whole-body tumor burden assessment in prostate cancer using ⁶⁸Ga-PSMA11 PET/CT

Our aim was to introduce and validate qPSMA, a semiautomatic software package for whole-body tumor burden assessment in prostate cancer patients using ⁶⁸Ga-prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) 11 PET/CT. Methods: qPSMA reads hybrid PET/ CT images in DICOM format. Its pipeline was written using Python and C11 languages. A bone mask based on CT and a normal-uptake mask including organs with physiologic ⁶⁸Ga-PSMA11 uptake are automatically computed. An SUV threshold of 3 and a liver-based threshold are used to segment bone and soft-tissue lesions, respectively. Manual corrections can be applied using different tools. Multiple output parameters are computed, that is, PSMA ligand-positive tumor volume (PSMA-TV), PSMA ligand-positive total lesion (PSMA-TL), PSMA SUV_mean, and PSMA SUV_max. Twenty ⁶⁸Ga-PSMA11 PET/CT data sets were used to validate and evaluate the performance characteristics of qPSMA. Four analyses were performed: validation of the semiautomatic algorithm for liver background activity determination, assessment of intra- and interobserver variability, validation of data from qPSMA by comparison with Syngo.via, and assessment of computational time and comparison of PSMA PET-derived parameters with serum prostate-specific antigen. Results: Automatic liver background calculation resulted in a mean relative difference of 0.74% (intraclass correlation coefficient [ICC], 0.996; 95%CI, 0.989;0.998) compared with METAVOL. Intra- and interobserver variability analyses showed high agreement (all ICCs . 0.990). Quantitative output parameters were compared for 68 lesions. Paired t testing showed no significant differences between the values obtained with the 2 software packages. The ICC estimates obtained for PSMA-TV, PSMA-TL, SUV_mean, and SUV_max were 1.000 (95%CI, 1.000;1.000), 1.000 (95%CI, 1.000;1.000), 0.995 (95%CI, 0.992;0.997), and 0.999 (95%CI, 0.999;1.000), respectively. The first and second reads for intraobserver variability resulted in mean computational times of 13.63 min (range, 8.22-25.45 min) and 9.27 min (range, 8.10-12.15 min), respectively (P 5 0.001). Highly significant correlations were found between serum prostate-specific antigen value and both PSMA-TV (r 5 0.72, P, 0.001) and PSMA-TL (r 5 0.66, P 5 0.002). Conclusion: Semiautomatic analyses of whole-body tumor burden in ⁶⁸Ga-PSMA11 PET/CT is feasible. qPSMA is a robust software package that can help physicians quantify tumor load in heavily metastasized prostate cancer patients.