Al[18F]F-NOTA-Octreotide Is Comparable to [68Ga]Ga-DOTA-TATE for PET/CT Imaging of Neuroendocrine Tumours in the Latin-American Population

Simple Summary In the present work we investigated the clinical utility of Al[F-18]F-NOTA-Octreotide (Al[F-18]F-OC) in comparison to [Ga-68]Ga-DOTA-TATE in patients diagnosed with neuroendocrine tumours. Our aim was to verify the recently published, promising results for Al[F-18]F-NOTA-Octreotide in the Latin-American population. Al[F-18]F-NOTA-Octreotide provided excellent image quality, detected NET lesions with high sensitivity and represents a highly promising, clinical alternative to [Ga-68]Ga-DOTA-TATE. PET imaging of neuroendocrine tumours (NET) is well established for staging and therapy follow-up. The short half-life, increasing costs, and regulatory issues significantly limit the availability of approved imaging agents, such as [Ga-68]Ga-DOTA-TATE. Al[F-18]F-NOTA-Octreotide provides a similar biodistribution and tumour uptake, can be produced on a large scale and may improve access to precision imaging. Here we prospectively compared the clinical utility of [Ga-68]Ga-DOTA-TATE and Al[F-18]F-NOTA-Octreotide in the Latin-American population. Our results showed that in patients with stage IV NETs [Ga-68]Ga-DOTA-TATE presents higher physiological uptake than Al[F-18]F-NOTA-Octreotide in the liver, hypophysis, salivary glands, adrenal glands (all p < 0.001), pancreatic uncinated process, kidneys, and small intestine (all p < 0.05). Nevertheless, despite the lower background uptake of Al[F-18]F-NOTA-Octreotide, comparative analysis of tumour-to-liver (TLR) and tumour-to-spleen (TSR) showed no statistically significant difference for lesions in the liver, bone, lymph nodes, and other tissues. Only three discordant lesions in highly-metastases livers were detected by [Ga-68]Ga-DOTA-TATE but not by Al[F-18]F-NOTA-Octreotide and only one discordant lesion was detected by Al[F-18]F-NOTA-Octreotide but not by [Ga-68]Ga-DOTA-TATE. Non-inferiority analysis showed that Al[F-18]F-NOTA-Octreotide is comparable to [Ga-68]Ga-DOTA-TATE. Hence, our results demonstrate that Al[F-18]F-NOTA-Octreotide provided excellent image quality, visualized NET lesions with high sensitivity and represents a highly promising, clinical alternative to [Ga-68]Ga-DOTA-TATE.