METHOD AND SYSTEM OF MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS ON VOLUME-WISE DATA OF REFERENCE STRUCTURE NORMALIZED IMAGES FOR IMPROVED QUALITY IN POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY STUDIES

摘要

A method and system are provided to mask out the background in dynamic PET images, to perform pre-normalization on the masked dynamic PET images, and to apply multivariate image analysis (e.g., principal component analysis PCA) on the masked pre-normalized dynamic PET images in order to improve the quality of the dynamic PET images and the PET study. A masking operation applies PCA to untreated dynamic PEET images before any pre-normalization in order to mask out the background pixels. This masking operation uses the Otsu method. A first normalization method is background noise pre-normalization where pixel values are corrected for background noise. A second normalization method is kinetic pre- normalization where the contrast within an image is improved. Multivariate analysis such as PCA may be applied on the whole volume to find the largest variance in the structure.