Canine Anatomic Phantom for Preclinical Dosimetry in Internal Emitter Therapy

The majority of investigational studies of new diagnostic and therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals use murine animal models for preclinical assessments of pharmacokinetics and organ radi-ation dosimetry. Although mice and rats are widely available and relatively inexpensive, their smaller organ anatomy relative to that of humans can lead to considerable differences in organ do-simetry, thus complicating extrapolations of dose–response re-lationships to human patients. Nonhuman primates circumvent these problems in many respects but are increasingly becoming expensive and limited because of ethical considerations. With the recent completion of the dog genome project and the recog-nition of many similarities between canine and human cancers, dogs are increasingly being considered in cancer research and drug development. The main objective of this study was to con-struct a 3-dimensional computational phantom of a large dog o