AutoSPET: An SPM plugin to automatize neuroimages PET analysis

Abstract

Neuroimaging analysis supports clinicians in the diagnosis of neurological diseases by extracting information from digital images. Due to the large number of images generated by new devices (e.g. PET ones), there is a lot of effort in defining computer-based tools to analyze and classify (brain) radiological images. Statistical tools, such as SPM (for Statistical Parametric Mapping), are largely used by physicians for image analysis. Nevertheless, large datasets analysis requires repetitive steps, due to the lack of automatic procedures. E.g. SPM requires human intervention during long and complex steps.We here present a tool, called AutoSPET (for Automatic SPM analysis for PET images), which allows to perform SPM analyses on large sets of PET images. It works as a meta-component orchestrating interactions with SPM, Matlab and with SPM plugins via a unified user interface. AutoSPET has been tested with real clinical datasets and it is publicly available as an official SPM plugin on the SPM website.