Brown adipose tissue (BAT) participates in the regulation of whole-body metabolism by producing a variety of adipokines. This study investigates into the BAT pattern and the clinical aspects of overweight and obese (OOB) vs. non-obese (NO) hyperparathyroidism (HPT) patients with the aim of assessing the impact of BAT and obesity on HPT. Parathyroid scans performed on 441 HPT patients between 2015 and 2020 were retrospectively analyzed in order to select the images with active BAT. Based on their BMI, the patients with active BAT were divided into OOB vs. NO. The results showed that BAT was present in cervical and supraclavicular regions, with a single localization especially among NO vs. multiple sites among OOB. The (total counts/pixels)BAT/(total counts/pixels)non-BAT ratio in the right cervical localization showed a significant difference between the groups with higher values in OOB. BMI, PTH, FT4, vitamin D, magnesium, creatinine, and urea had significant correlations with BAT ratios. The predictive values showed that right cervical ratios higher than 1.52 and right supraclavicular ratios lower than 1.15 indicated an increased probability of being OOB. The significant correlations between BAT activation in OOB vs. NO and HPT clinical parameters could be useful for developing potential treatments based on this tissue.

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Aim: This paper aims to emphasize the importance of nuclear imaging for cancer patients evolution and personalized treatment. Material and method: A retrospective study comprising 5,670 patients, who performed bone scans, between 2003-2015, at the "Sf. Spiridon" County Clinical Emergency Hospital Iași Nuclear Medicine Laboratory. Studied parameters were demographic data, referral dia gnosis, staging, tumor markers, bone metastases and patient follow-up. Results: Of all, 3,960 were oncological patients. They performed in evolution 3,846 bone scans, between two (21.01%) and 11 (0.05%) explorations. Patients' age varied between 2 and 97 years (with two peaks, at 55 and 65). Gender distribution showed female (61.73%) over male (38.27%) predominance, especially in multiple scans (73.32%). For half of the patients the bone scan showed evolution (worsening), meaning the treatment was only partially effective and r equired modifications. Ethically, for these patients bone scan was irreplaceable. Its absence would have meant undergoing a partially/inefficient treatment, a reserved prognosis and a shorter survival period. The benefits outweigh the risks in terms of radiation exposure. Conclusions: Ethics in oncological nuclear medicine is complex, following the balance between risk and benefit, in the interest of a personalized management. As a result, ethically it is equivalent to maximizing the benefits of this minimally invasive functional investigation, scintigraphy, which is essential for treatment modulation, in order to improve the disease prognosis and increase the patients' survival rate, for precision medicine in cancer.

Although neuroendocrine tumours (NETs) are intensively studied, their diagnosis and consequently personalised therapy management is still puzzling due to their tumoral heterogeneity. In their theragnosis algorithm, receptor somatostatin scintigraphy takes the central place, the diagnosis receptor somatostatin analogue (RSA) choice depending on laboratory experience and accessibility. However, in all cases, the results depend decisively on correct radiotracer tumoral uptake quantification, where unfortunately there are still unrevealed clues and lack of standardization. We propose an improved method to quantify the biodistribution of gamma-emitting RSA, using tissular corrected uptake indices. We conducted a bi-centric retrospective study on 101 patients with different types of NETs. Three uptake indices obtained after applying new corrections to areas of interest drawn for the tumour and for three reference organs (liver, spleen and lung) were statistically analysed. For the corrected pathological uptake indices, the results showed a significant decrease in the error of estimating the occurrence of errors and an increase in the diagnostic predictive power for NETs, especially in the case of lung-referring corrected index. In conclusion, these results support the importance of corrected uptake indices use in the analysis of 99mTcRSA biodistribution for a better personalised diagnostic accuracy of NETs patients.