Article Efficiency of positron-emission tomography with 18 F-DOPA for visualization of dophaminergency system of brain Ksenia Tutsenko 2 , Alina Khoroshavina 3 , Vladislav Abramov 4 , Mariia Tunik 4 , Tatiana Anuchina 2 , Natalia Malchik 2 Dmitry Pokhabov 2,4 , Anastasiya Savelyeva 2,4 and Michael Sadovsky 1,2,4 * Citation: Tutsenko K.; Khoroshavina A.; Abramov V.; Tunik M.; Anuchina T.; Malchik N.; Pokhabov D.; Saveleva A.; Sadovsky M. Efficiency of positron-emission tomography with 18 F-DOPA for visualization of dophaminergency system of brain. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2022, 1, 0. https://doi.org/ Received: Accepted: Published: Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neu- tral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and insti- tutional affiliations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Submitted to Int. J. Mol. Sci. for possible open access publication under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attri- bution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Institute of computational modelling SB RAS; msad@icm.krasn.ru 2 V.F.Voino-Yasenetsky Krasnoyarsk state medical university 3 Almazov Center 4 Federal Research & Clinic Center of FMBA of Russia * Correspondence: msad@icm.krasn.ru; Cell tel.: +7-902-990-4597 (M.S.) Abstract: Positron-emission tomography is powerful but costly tool for various medical investiga- tions. In particular, it is used in Parkinsons disease and essential tremor diagnostics. However, yet there is no standardized figures of the references, for it. We examined the PET efficiency for the analysis of development and degradation of dophaminergic neurons in Parkinsons disease. The informative indices are determined from the observed PET data. Also, high efficiency of PET for Parkinsons disease as approved. Keywords: elastic map, clustering, classification, degeneration, diagnostics 1. Introduction Parkinson’s disease (PD) is among the most common neurodegenerative diseases of the elderly. PD is rare among youth [1]; however, the disease rate grows in a population elder than 60 [2,3]. Also, the decrease in the average age of the patients makes the problem worse. Men suffer from this pathology at a twice higher rate than women [4], although paper [5] reports an absence of the difference between genders in the disease rating. The etiology of PD is still unknown in detail; late age, a family history of PD, ex- posure to adverse environmental factors are among risk factors [6,7]. The pathogenesis of PD is associated with neuron death, and these neurons are the most crucial com- ponent of the extrapyramidal system producing dopamine. At an early stage of the disease, the most significant loss of dopaminergic neurons is observed in the area of the ventrolateral substantia nigra; a progression of the disease causes the expansion of the neurodegenerative processes [8]. Also, PD is peculiar for accumulating an intracellular protein (α-synuclein). Lewy bodies, consisting of aggregated α-synuclein, are increased in number in cholinergic and monoaminergic neurons of the brain stem and neurons of the olfactory system [9,10]. The death of dopaminergic neurons at an early stage of the disease does not manifest in motor symptoms [11,12]. Positron emission tomography (PET) is an up-to-date and promising method in diagnosing PD and other diseases [13]. The registration of γ quanta emitted in the annihilation of an electron and a positron emitted by a radiopharmaceutical (RP) stands behind the method. RP consists of a biologically active substance (BAS) labelled with a positron-emitting radioisotope. One must adequately choose RP for successful PET diagnostics: it must be actively metabolized by a specific organ or a neoplasm [14,15]. The isotope used in RP must have a short half-life period, and tissues must weakly absorb its radiation. It is necessary to ensure a minimal radiation load on a human body and a high resolution of the recorded image. PET is advantageous in diagnosing PD in terms of high sensitivity to the metabolic changes in the target structures before the onset of atrophy. PET-examination in PD diagnosis unambiguously allows determining Version January 31, 2022 submitted to Int. J. Mol. Sci. https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijms Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 1 February 2022 doi:10.20944/preprints202202.0010.v1 © 2022 by the author(s). Distributed under a Creative Commons CC BY license.