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Single STE-MR Acquisition in MR-Based Attenuation Correction of Brain PET Imaging Employing a Fully Automated and Reproducible Level-Set Segmentation Approach

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Abstract

Purpose

The aim of this study is to introduce a fully automatic and reproducible short echo-time (STE) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) segmentation approach for MR-based attenuation correction of positron emission tomography (PET) data in head region.

Procedures

Single STE-MR imaging was followed by generating attenuation correction maps (μ-maps) through exploiting an automated clustering-based level-set segmentation approach to classify head images into three regions of cortical bone, air, and soft tissue. Quantitative assessment was performed by comparing the STE-derived region classes with the corresponding regions extracted from X-ray computed tomography (CT) images.

Results

The proposed segmentation method returned accuracy and specificity values of over 90 % for cortical bone, air, and soft tissue regions. The MR- and CT-derived μ-maps were compared by quantitative histogram analysis.

Conclusions

The results suggest that the proposed automated segmentation approach can reliably discriminate bony structures from the proximal air and soft tissue in single STE-MR images, which is suitable for generating MR-based μ-maps for attenuation correction of PET data.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Quantitative MR Imaging and Spectroscopy Group (QMISG), Research Center for Molecular and Cellular Imaging (RCMCI), Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

    Anahita Fathi Kazerooni & Hamidreza Saligheh Rad

  2. Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

    Anahita Fathi Kazerooni, Mohammad Reza Ay & Hamidreza Saligheh Rad

  3. Medical Imaging Systems Group (MISG), Research Center for Molecular and Cellular Imaging (RCMCI), Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

    Mohammad Reza Ay & Parisa Khateri

  4. College of Letters and Science, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, USA

    Saman Arfaie

Authors
  1. Anahita Fathi Kazerooni
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  2. Mohammad Reza Ay
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  3. Saman Arfaie
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  4. Parisa Khateri
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  5. Hamidreza Saligheh Rad
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hamidreza Saligheh Rad.

Ethics declarations

Study approval was obtained from the Medical Ethics Committee of Tehran University of Medical Sciences (License number 1432), and the subjects were included if they provided written informed consent.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Tehran University of Medical Sciences research committee with the Ethics License Number 1432.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Fathi Kazerooni, A., Ay, M.R., Arfaie, S. et al. Single STE-MR Acquisition in MR-Based Attenuation Correction of Brain PET Imaging Employing a Fully Automated and Reproducible Level-Set Segmentation Approach. Mol Imaging Biol 19, 143–152 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11307-016-0990-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11307-016-0990-5

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