A preliminary study on comparison and fusion of metabolic images of PET with anatomic images of CT and MRI

Abstract

To compare and match metabolic images of PET with anatomic images of CT and MRI. The CT or MRI images of the patients were obtained through a photo scanner, andthen transferred to the remote workstation of PET scanner with a floppy disk. A fusion method was developed to match the 2-dimensional CT or MRI slices with the correlative slices of 3-dimensional volume PET images. Twenty-nine metabolically changed foci were accurately localized in 21 epilepsy patients' MRI images, while MRI alone had only 6 true positive findings. In 53 cancer or suspicious cancer patients, 53 positive lesions detected by PET were compared and matched with the corresponding lesions in CT or MRI images, in which 10 lesions were missed. On the other hand, 23 lesions detected from the patients' CT or MRI images were negative or with low uptake in the PET images, and they were finally proved as benign. Comparing and matching metabolic images with anatomic images helped obtain a full understanding about the lesion and its peripheral structures. The fusion method was simple, practical and useful for localizing metabolically changed lesions.