Patient-adaptive lesion metabolism analysis by dynamic PET images

Dynamic PET imaging provides important spatial-temporal information for metabolism analysis of organs and tissues, and generates a great reference for clinical diagnosis and pharmacokinetic analysis. Due to poor statistical properties of the measurement data in low count dynamic PET acquisition and disturbances from surrounding tissues, identifying small lesions inside the human body is still a challenging issue. The uncertainties in estimating the arterial input function will also limit the accuracy and reliability of the metabolism analysis of lesions. Furthermore, the sizes of the patients and the motions during PET acquisition will yield mismatch against general purpose reconstruction system matrix, this will also affect the quantitative accuracy of metabolism analyses of lesions. In this paper, we present a dynamic PET metabolism analysis framework by defining a patient adaptive system matrix to improve the lesion metabolism analysis. Both patient size information and potential small lesions are incorporated by simulations of phantoms of different sizes and individual point source responses. The new framework improves the quantitative accuracy of lesion metabolism analysis, and makes the lesion identification more precisely. The requirement of accurate input functions is also reduced. Experiments are conducted on Monte Carlo simulated data set for quantitative analysis and validation, and on real patient scans for assessment of clinical potential.