The dopamine transporter (DAT) is an important imaging target since changes in DAT have been implicated in a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders and can result from certain classes of medications. [11C]PE2I, a radioligand with high specificity for DAT, has been shown to exhibit favorable kinetics and to produce high contrast positron emission tomography (PET) images. In order to better characterize this ligand and assess its measurement reliability, PET images of seven subjects were acquired in a test-retest paradigm. For optimal model performance, each subject was scanned for 120 minutes, ensuring that high binding regions could reach equilibrium, a validated coregistration method was performed for accurate anatomical delineations and an exhaustive search for a reference region having one-tissue compartment kinetics was undertaken. Eleven modeling methods were tested and six metrics were used for method evaluation. A non-iterative two-tissue compartment method with 100 minutes of scanning time was found to be optimal for characterizing [11C]PE2I.

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