A simultaneous reconstruction/segmentation method for /sup 123/I SPECT striata imaging

For diagnosis purpose, quantification of /sup 123/I labeled dopaminergic tracers in striata regions is required. The quantification is often performed by manually or automatically choosing regions of interest in striata to calculate absolute or relative bindings. This segmentation step is inextricably linked to the quality of reconstruction process. It is well known that SPECT suffers from poor data quality, imposing the use of regularization such as low-pass filtering. Thus, the detection of organ edges is made difficult. The authors propose a simultaneous reconstruction/segmentation method which iteratively warps some initial shapes to the desired objects. The method was tested on an anthropomorphic striatal phantom, for the detection of the striatal compartments.