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Automatic liver detection and standardised uptake value evaluation in whole-body Positron Emission
Stephane Chauvie1, Elisa Bertone1, Fabrizio Bergesio1
1Medical Physics Unit Division, Santa Croce e Carle Hospital, Cuneo, Italy.
Background And Objective:
Standardised Uptake Value (SUV), in clinical research and practice, is a marker of tumour avidity in Positron Emission Tomography/Computed Tomography (PET/CT). Since many technical, physical and physiological factors affect the SUV absolute measurement, the liver uptake is often used as reference value both in quantitative and semi-quantitative evaluation. The purpose of this investigation was to automatically detect the liver position in whole-body PET/CT scans and extract its average SUV value.
Methods:
We developed an algorithm, called LIver DEtection Algorithm (LIDEA), that analyses PET/CT scans, and under the assumption that the liver is a large homogeneous volume near the centre of mass of the patient, finds its position and automatically places a region of interest (ROI) in the liver, which is used to calculate the average SUV. The algorithm was validated on a population of 630 PET/CT scans coming from more than 60 different scanners. The SUV was also calculated by manually placing a large ROI in the liver.
Results:
LIDEA identified the liver with a 97.3% sensitivity with PET/CT images only and reached a 98.9% correct detection rate when using the co-registered CT scan to avoid liver misidentification in the right lung. The average liver SUV obtained with LIDEA was successfully validated against its manual assessment, with no systematic difference (0.11 ± 0.36 SUV units) and a R2=0.89 correlation coefficient.
Conclusions:
LIDEA proved to be a reliable tool to automatically identify and extract the average SUV of the liver in oncological whole-body PET/CT scans.
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