An International Study of Factors Affecting Variability of Dosimetry Calculations, Part 1: Design and Early Results of the SNMMI Dosimetry Challenge

In this work, we present details and initial results from a 177 Lu dosimetry challenge that has been designed to collect data from the global nuclear medicine community aiming at identifying, understanding, and quantitatively characterizing the consequences of the various sources of variability in dosimetry. Methods: The challenge covers different approaches to performing dosimetry: planar, hybrid, and pure SPECT. It consists of 5 different and independent tasks to measure the variability of each step in the dosimetry workflow. Each task involves the calculation of absorbed doses to organs and tumors and was meant to be performed in sequential order. The order of the tasks is such that results from a previous one would not affect subsequent ones. Different sources of variability are removed as the participants advance through the challenge by giving them the data required to begin the calculations at different steps of the dosimetry workflow. Data from 2 patients after a therapeutic administration of 177 Lu-DOTATATE were used for this study. The data are hosted in Deep Blue Data, a data repository service run by the University of Michigan. Participants submit results in standardized spreadsheets and with a short description summarizing their methods. Results: In total, 178 participants have signed up for the challenge, and 119 submissions have been received. Sixty percent of submissions have used voxelized dose methods, with 47% of those using commercial software. In initial analysis, the volume of organs showed a variability of up to 49.8% whereas for lesions this was up to 176%. Variability in time-integrated activity was up to 192%. Mean absorbed doses varied up to 57.7%. Segmentation is the step that required the longest time to complete, with a median of 43 min. The median total time to perform the full calculation was 89 min. Conclusion: To advance dosimetry and encourage its routine use in radiopharmaceutical therapy applications, it is critical that dosimetry results be reproducible across centers. Our initial results provide insights into the variability associated with performing dose calculations. It is expected that this dataset, including results from future stages, will result in efforts to standardize and harmonize methods and procedures.