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PMOD Image Segmentation Tool Introduction (PSEG)

Preclinical imaging systems allow following the uptake and metabolism of labeled compounds in whole mice and major parts of rats. To exploit this wealth of information with regard to phamacokinetics, it is necessary to localize all relevant tissue structures and assess their tracer concentration in time, which is then analyzed with kinetic models.

Manual segmentation is a tedious process and prone to considerable subjective variability. It is challenging for studies involving many animals, has a direct impact on the accuracy of the study endpoint and consequently on the required sample size.

The PSEG tool supports the semi-automatic segmentation of dynamic rodent PET studies within only a few minutes. It applies a patented clustering approach for grouping neighboring image pixels with similar kinetic behaviors. This process creates a hierarchy of compact tissue segments covering the whole body. Segments on low hierarchy levels are small and highly homogeneous regarding kinetics, whereas they grow towards higher levels and become kinetically more variable. The user can interactively browse through the hierarchy levels and assign an organ label when an appropriate representation has been found. If tissue structures cannot directly be represented by a segment or a union of segments, the user can interactively outline them in an anatomical reference image.

Once all relevant tissue structures have been segmented, PSEG readily calculates their average PET uptake curves (also time-activity curves, TAC) and optionally corrects them for the partial-volume effect.

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Methodology

User Interface

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