The fully-automated PIANO™ PET pipeline for both exploratory voxelwise analysis and regional SBR analysis was used to investigate the Parkinson's disease populations.
References
Carbonell, F., Zijdenbos, A.P., Hempel, E., Hajós, M., Bedell, B.J. A novel method for harmonization of PET image spatial resolution without phantoms. EJNMMI Physics 12: 1-17, 2025; doi: 10.1186/s40658-025-00740-9
Similar to the previous page, this illustration provides a high level overviews of the various steps involved in PIANO™ processing of VMAT2 PET data using our automated processing "pipeline".
VMAT2 PET scans first underwent:
- Frame-to-frame motion correction across frames.
- Signal averaging across frames.
- Smoothing to a target resolution of 8 mm using SPITFIRE™ (Carbonell, 2025).
- Registration to the anatomical 3D T1-weighted MRI scan.
Followed by:
- Regional analysis of the signal on pre-defined regions-of-interest (ROIs), warped from an atlas through the registration of the 3D T1-weighted scan to its corresponding anatomical template.
- SBR (specific binding ratio) was calculated as the ratio of each ROI to a reference region minus one to account for non-specific binding; the occipital cortex was chosen as the reference region because it has minimal VMAT2 expression and is minimally affected by neurodegenerative diseases.