Advanced PET/CT fusion workstation for oncology imaging

Cancer management using positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is rapidly expanding its role in clinical practice. The high sensitivity of PET to locate cancer can be confounded by the minimal anatomical information it provides. Additional anatomical information would greatly benefit diagnosis, staging, therapy planning and treatment monitoring. Computed tomography (CT) provides detailed anatomical information but is less sensitive towards cancer localization than PET. Combining PET and CT images would enable accurate localization of the functional information with respect to detailed patient anatomy. We have developed a software platform to facilitate efficient visualization of PET/CT image studies. We used a deformable registration algorithm using mutual information and a B-spline model of the deformation. Several useful visualization modes were implemented with an efficient and robust method for switching between modes and handling large datasets. Processing of several studies can be queued and the results browsed. The software has been validated with clinical data.

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