We introduce the use of a novel physical phantom to quantify the performance of a motion-correction algorithm. The goal of the study was to assess a PET-PET image registration, the final output of which is a motion-corrected highstatistics PET image volume, a procedure called Reconstruct, Register and Average (RRA). Methods: A phantom was constructed using 5 ~2mL Ge-68 filled spheres suspended in a water-filled tank via lightweight fishing line and driven by a periodic motion. Comparison of maximum and mean concentration and sphere volume was performed. Ground truth data were measured using no-motion. With motion, five replicate datasets of 3-minute phase-gated data for each of 3 different periods of motion were acquired. Gated PET images were registered using a multi-resolution level-sets-based non-rigid registration (NRR). The NRR images were then averaged to form a motion-corrected, high-statistics image volume. Spheres from all images were segmented and compared across the imaging conditions. Results: The average center-of-mass range of motion was 7.35, 5.83 and 2.66 mm for the spheres over the three periods of 8, 6 and 4 seconds. The center-of-mass for all spheres in all conditions was corrected to within 1mm on average using NRR as compared to the gated data. For the RRA data, the sphere maximum activity concentration (MAC) was on average 40.2% higher (-4.0% to 116.7%) and sphere volume was on average 12.0% smaller (-8.2% to 28.1%) as compared to the un-gated data with motion. The RRA results for MAC were on average 70% more accurate and for sphere volume 80% more accurate as compared to the un-gated data. Conclusions: The results show that the novel phantom setup and analysis methods are a promising evaluation technique for the assessment of motion correction algorithms. Benefits include the ability to compare against ground truth data without motion but with control of the statistical data quality and background variability. Use of a nonmoving object adjacent to spheres in motion, the spatial extent of the motion correction algorithm was confirmed to be local to the induced motion and to not affect the stationary object. A further benefit of the assessment technique is the use of ground truth data.
This paper proposes a novel framework for tumor detection in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) images. A set of 8 second-order texture features obtained from the gray level cooccurrence matrix (GLCM) across 26 offsets, together with uptake value was used to construct a feature vector at each voxel in the data. Volume of Interest (VOI) samples from 42 images (7 patients with 6 gates each), marked by a radiologist, representing 5 distinct anatomy types and pathology were used to train a logit boost classifier. A ten-fold crossvalidation showed a true positive rate of 96%and a false positive rate of 8% for tumor classification. The test dataset consisted of 50 × 50 × 40 representative VOIs from gated PET images of 3 patients. The classifier was run on the test data, followed by an SUV-based thresholding and elimination of noise using connected component analysis. The method detected 10/12 (83%) tumors while detecting an average of 20 false positive structures.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.