Development of Automated Software Program for the Analysis of Parkinson's Diesease Dopamine Transporter Scans

This project will develop a fast, automated, and accurate software processing package that will objectively yield striatal quantitative uptake values for evaluating Parkinson's disease (PD) diagnosis and progression. This fully automated, Objective Striatal Analysis (OSA) package will evaluate subjects referred for SPECT neuroreceptor imaging studies, with a sensitivity and specificity higher than currently possible by visual inspection or manual image processing methods. By employing OSA, it will be possible to analyze archival scans, which otherwise would require months of manual labor. Without any user interaction, OSA will: (1) reorient the reconstructed brain volume along the cantho-meatal line; (2) identify axial slices with striatal activity; (3) place templates on the left and right caudate, the putamen, and the occipital background regions, following set rules for movement of regions; and (4) extract count density data for the determination of regional striatal. The required algorithms will be coded into a software package, and the results will be applied to groups of patients and healthy volunteers. The results will be compared to results obtained by manually analyzing the same subject groups. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: The OSA for Parkinson¿s Disease should lead to more accurate and efficient clinical studies requiring fewer subjects. It would then be possible to evaluate new radiopharmaceutical and therapy agents without obfuscating the results by improper or insufficiently-tested image processing methods. In addition, the technology should serve as a model for the development of similar objective algorithms to fully assess radiopharmaceuticals in other disorders, such as Alzheimer¿s disease.