Patent Document ID: 8233689
Application ID: 12065119
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of volume-wise positron emission tomography image analysis of dynamic positron emission tomography images including a background and an object to study, the images comprising multiple frames of multiple slices, the method, comprising the steps of: (a) masking the background in the dynamic positron emission tomography images, said masking comprising the steps of: (i) generating a first principal component image as a function of applying a principal component analysis method on the positron emission tomography images for the positron emission tomography image; (ii) determining a threshold value for the first principal component image image; (iii) converting the first principal component image into a binary image as a function of the threshold value wherein each pixel in the first principal component image is assigned a binary value indicating whether it is one of an object pixel and a background pixel; (iv) identifying a set of coordinates for the object pixels wherein the set of coordinates identifies the object pixels in the dynamic positron emission tomography image; (v) extracting an object pixel value from the dynamic positron emission tomography image as a function of the set of coordinates for the object pixel; and (vi) storing the object pixel value in a column vector of a matrix; and (b) performing pre-normalization on the masked dynamic positron emission tomography images from step (A), said pre-normalization comprising the steps of: (i) normalizing the masked dynamic positron emission tomography images to correct for a background noise; (ii) performing a kinetic pre-normalization by determining a region of interest for an outlined region of the object under study in the masked positron emission tomography images; (iii) dividing all f the slices for each frame by the mean value within the region of interest within the frame; and applying a multivariate analysis method on the masked pre-normalized dynamic positron emission tomography images.