A Methodology to Measure Glucose Metabolism by Quantitative Analysis of PET Images

Positron emission tomography (PET) with F-18 fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) tracer is the standard clinical technique to measure myocardial and vessel metabolism and viability and to investigate the metabolic syndrome associated with cardiovascular diseases. The quantitative analysis of PET images allows one to study the cardiovascular physiological processes, by extracting quantitative parameters from the analysis of the tracer kinetic. Here, we propose a new methodology to quantify and evaluate the evolution of glucose metabolism inside the myocardium and the large vascular structures over time. We merge and analyze PET and CT cardiac images, extracting different volumes of interest (VOI) and performing quantitative measurements. To validate it, we apply the methodology to merge images of the aorta vessel for patients affected by metabolic syndrome. The application of the proposed approach to the use case reveals a correlation between administered drugs and metabolic syndrome, measuring the glucose metabolic rate (MRGlu) in both the myocardium and aorta. The proposed methodology can be used to evaluate some cardiovascular risk indexes of diabetic patients, too. The proposed methodology can also be deployed to analyze other application domains.