PET Measurement of Renal Glomerular Filtration Rate: Is There a Role in Nuclear Medicine?

The article by Wakabayashi et al. in this issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine (1) describes the evaluation and potential use of 18F-fluorodeoxy sorbitol as a potential PET agent, which can be used for the measurement of glomerular filtration rate (GFR). There is good reason to consider the possible use of a GFR agent in renal nuclear medicine. The standard of measurement of renal function used by the urologist and nephrologist is the GFR. Currently this is estimated using serum creatinine and creatinine estimated renal function, which is inaccurate and does not provide any information about individual renal function (2). Most of the attention of investigators in renal nuclear medicine in recent years has been directed toward agents that measure tubular function and effective renal plasma flow rather than GFR. This effort has been spearheaded by Dr. Andrew Taylor et al., who have introduced several compounds in recent years that are promising and have a high renal extraction (3). The advantage of an agent that is extracted to a high extent by the tubules for imaging with a SPECT camera