Quantitative Intensity Harmonization of Dopamine Transporter SPECT Images Using Gamma Mixture Models.

Affiliation

Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. [Email]

Abstract

Differences in site, device, and/or settings may cause large variations in the intensity profile of dopamine transporter (DAT) single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) images. However, the current standard to evaluate these images, the striatal binding ratio (SBR), does not efficiently account for this heterogeneity and the assessment can be unequivalent across distinct acquisition pipelines. In this work, we present a voxel-based automated approach to intensity normalize such type of data that improves on cross-session interpretation.

Keywords

Dopamine transporter,Gamma distribution,Intensity normalization,Multicenter studies,PPMI,SPECT,