Highlights
- •Anatomically accurate delineation of volumes-of-interest.
- •Full recovery of striatal uptake.
- •Implemented solely via free and open-source software.
Abstract
Purpose
Functional imaging with 123I-FP-CIT SPECT suffers from poor spatial resolution resulting in partial-volume effect,
which affects the subsequent semi-quantification. Definition of regions of interest
for semi-quantification is further subject to user's experience and inter-observer
variability. The aim of this work has been to develop an automatic method for definition
of volumes of interest and partial-volume correction using patient-specific MRI and
providing complete contrast recovery in striatal region.
Method
The method consists of spatial pre-processing (image segmentation and multi-modality
registration), partial-volume correction (performed by region-based voxel-wise technique),
and calculation of uptake indices in striatal structures. Anthropomorphic striatal
phantom was used to optimize the method and to assess linearity, accuracy, and reproducibility.
The method was tested on 58 patient datasets and compared with clinical assessment
and BasGan software.
Results
The method works automatically. The output is highly linear regarding changing striatal
uptake. Complete contrast recovery is achieved using 6.5 mm FWHM. Accuracy is better
than 0.15 in terms of RMSE between measured and true uptake indices. Reproducibility
is better than 5% for normal uptake ratio. The method outperformed clinical assessment
in all measures. With patient data, it provided results closer to BasGan (RMSE 0.9)
than to clinical assessment (RMSE 1.9) and fairly correlated with both.
Conclusion
The proposed method provides complete recovery of striatal contrast under given acquisition
and reconstruction conditions. It reduces intra- and inter-observer variability, accurately
defines volumes of interest, and effectively suppresses partial-volume effect. It
can be reproduced using publicly available software.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: May 27, 2020
Accepted:
May 17,
2020
Received in revised form:
May 15,
2020
Received:
May 14,
2018
Identification
Copyright
© 2020 Associazione Italiana di Fisica Medica. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
