Development of Automated Software Program for the Analysis of Alzheimer's Disease Beta-Amyloid Scans

This project will develop a fast, automated, and accurate software processing package that will objectively yield beta-amyloid uptake values for evaluating Alzheimer¿s disease diagnosis and progression. This fully-automated, Objective and Generalized new Radiotracer Analysis (OGRE) package will evaluate subjects referred for PET or SPECT beta-amyloid imaging studies, with a sensitivity and reproducibility higher than that offered by the current techniques of visual inspection or manual image processing. Without user interaction, OGRE will: (1) reorient a time series of reconstructed SPECT or PET brain volume to a standard geometry and orientation; (2) extract SPECT or PET uptake values from 116 brain areas; (3) generate 116 decay corrected time activity curves (TACs) from the time sequence; and (4) interface the TACs to software modeling programs, so that the radio tracer kinetics of new radio ligands or therapeutic agents can be evaluated. The required algorithms will be coded into a software package, and the results will be applied to groups of patients and volunteers. Then, the results will be compared to those obtained using manual analysis by a highly-trained image processing technologist. Commercial Applications and other Benefits as described by the awardee: The automated-image processing package is expected to accomplish 2-3 hours of clinical, quantitative manual image processing within 5 minutes, while providing reproducible results across various imaging centers.