A post-acquisition standardization method for positron emission tomography images

Aliasghar Mortazi; Jayaram K. Udupa; Yubing Tong; Drew A. Torigian

doi:10.1117/12.2550423

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16 March 2020 A post-acquisition standardization method for positron emission tomography images

Aliasghar Mortazi, Jayaram K. Udupa, Yubing Tong, Drew A. Torigian

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Proceedings Volume 11314, Medical Imaging 2020: Computer-Aided Diagnosis; 113143U (2020) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2550423
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2020, Houston, Texas, United States

Abstract

We propose a new standardization method to mitigate the undesired effects of factors such as body weight, duration of radiotracer uptake period, partial volume effects, etc., that impede accurate quantitative analysis of PET images. We introduce new metrics for evaluation and comparison among different standardization methods. The proposed standardization method can improve disease quantification from PET images, as PET is one of the major clinical imaging tools used to evaluate patients with cancer and other disorders. It is based on the MRI standardization method proposed by Nyul et al., but modified for application to PET images. A new approach is proposed to remove the unwanted effect of the tail of image histograms by finding an optimal maximum percentile from the coefficient variations of metabolic activity of reference healthy organs. We show that after applying our standardization method, the coefficient of variation among the mean metabolic activities of healthy organs decreases compared to that obtained from non-standardized images.

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Aliasghar Mortazi, Jayaram K. Udupa, Yubing Tong, and Drew A. Torigian "A post-acquisition standardization method for positron emission tomography images", Proc. SPIE 11314, Medical Imaging 2020: Computer-Aided Diagnosis, 113143U (16 March 2020); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2550423

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