The use of weather nowcasting convolutional neural network extrapolators in cardiac PET imaging

Algorithms to predict short-term changes in local weather modalities have been used in meteorology for many years. These algorithms predict the temporospatial change in the movement of weather patterns such as cloud cover or precipitation. This paper extends convolutional neural network models for weather prediction/nowcasting to predict evolution in the extrapolation of sequentially acquired count data seen with cardiac positron tomography (PET) data to expected value temporally rather than spatially.

Six different algorithms used for nowcasting were modified and applied to confirm the approach. These algorithms were trained on an image data set of both simulated ellipsoids and simulated cardiac PET data. The peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM) were calculated for each of these trained models. They were compared to the BM3D denoising algorithm as a baseline comparison to a standard method of image denoising.

Most of the implemented algorithms showed a significant improvement in both PSNR and SSIM when compared with the baseline standard, especially when the algorithms were implemented in combination. The best results were obtained with a combination of the ConvLSTM and TrajGRU algorithms with a PSNR improvement over the standard of 5 and more than double the SSIM metric.

This approach of using serially acquired count data to extrapolate a future expected representation through convolutional neural networks has been shown to produce accurate representations of the expected value when compared with a baseline analytic methodology. This paper confirms that algorithms such as these can be used to substantially improve image estimation and shows significant improvement over a baseline standard.