New semi-automatic ROI setting system for brain PET images based on elastic model

We have developed a semi-automatic ROI setting system for brain PET images. It is based on the elastic network model that fits the standard ROI atlas into individual brain image. The standard ROI atlas is a set of segments that represent each anatomical region. For transformation, the operator needs to set only three kinds of district anatomical features: manually determined midsagittal line, brain contour line determined with SNAKES algorithm semi-automatically, a few manually determined specific ROIs to be used for exact transformation. Improvement of the operation time and the inter-operator variance were demonstrated in the experiment by comparing with the conventional manual ROI setting. The operation time was reduced to 50% in almost all cases. And the inter-operator variance was reduced to one seventh in the maximum case. (author)