Simplification of analysis procedures in inter-subject studies with cardiac PET imaging

Quantitative analysis in positron emission tomography imaging usually necessitates several studies carried out under the same protocol in order to get functional or metabolic parameter values with low variations. Apart from subject preparation and measurements in similar conditions, the data analysis should be done as uniformly as possible. In this work we report PET data obtained in normal and ischemic rats, measured with (13)N-ammonia and (11)C-acetate to extract myocardial blood flow and oxygen consumption, and analysed with the usual region of interest (ROI) drawing method in each rat individually, in comparison to a new method based on resampling all the rat heart images to a common model, then the ROIs are drawn once and copied onto each rat image sequence.