Automatic reorientation to generate short-axis myocardial PET images

Abstract Background Accurately redirecting reconstructed Positron emission tomography (PET) images into short-axis (SA) images shows great significance for subsequent clinical diagnosis. We developed a system for automatic redirection and quantitative analysis of myocardial PET images. Methods A total of 128 patients were enrolled for 18 F-FDG PET/CT myocardial metabolic images (MMIs), including 3 image classifications: without defects, with defects, and excess uptake. The automatic reorientation system includes five modules: regional division, myocardial segmentation, ellipsoid fitting, image rotation and quantitative analysis. First, the left ventricular geometry-based canny edge detection (LVG-CED) was developed and compared with the other 5 common region segmentation algorithms, the optimized partitioning was determined based on partition success rate. Then, 9 myocardial segmentation methods and 4 ellipsoid fitting methods were combined to derive 36 cross combinations for diagnostic performance in terms of Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC), Kendall correlation coefficient (KCC), Spearman correlation coefficient (SCC), and determination coefficient. Finally, the deflection angles were computed by ellipsoid fitting and the SA images were derived by affine transformation. Furthermore, the polar maps were used for quantitative analysis of SA images, and the redirection effects of 3 different image classifications were analyzed using correlation coefficients. Results On the dataset, LVG-CED outperformed other methods in the regional division module with a 100% success rate. In 36 cross combinations, PSO-FCM and LLS-SVD performed the best in terms of correlation coefficient. The linear results indicate that our algorithm (LVG-CED, PSO-FCM, and LLS-SVD) has good consistency with the reference manual method. In quantitative analysis, the similarities between our method and the reference manual method were higher than 96% at 17 segments. Moreover, our method demonstrated excellent performance in all 3 image classifications. Conclusion Our algorithm system could realize accurate automatic reorientation and quantitative analysis of PET MMIs, which is also effective for images suffering from interference.