Automatic SUV Extraction and Biodistribution Analysis of Preclinical PET

Preclinical positron emission tomographyPETplays a significant role in monitoring radiotracer biodistributions for the development of new therapiesThe standardized uptake valueSUVhas become one of the most important quantitation measures in PET analysisHoweverSUV extraction from PET data hinges on the ability to clearly delineate the organ region of interestROIfrom an anatomical referenceCross comparison of different organ SUVs and biodistributions is also cumbersome due to complex registration strategies of each animal with an unknown pose and sizeOperator bias and lack of efficient co registration strategies results in poor data reproducibilityhigh data variabilitylow data throughput and prohibits the use of fully automated data parsing and data analysis for predicting early therapy outcomes with high sensitivityIn Vivo Analytics will directly address these shortcomings by developing InVivoPETIt will be a cloud based PET data analysis toolwhich will enable automatic organ SUV extraction followed by an instantaneous biodistribution analysisInVivoPET will automatically coregister PET images to the animal s anatomy and will calculate biodistributions in almost real timeInVivoPET consists of several partsFirsta Body Conforming Animal MoldBCAMenables consistent spatial and longitudinal registration of the animal s pose and location to the PET dataSeconda statistical mouse atlas based on an Organ Probability MapOPMprovides a digital and operator independent organ ROI templateThirda cloud based software with a browser based user interface enables an automatic organ SUV extraction with following biodistribution analysisLastmachine learning and data mining algorithms can be applied in the future that will further enhance study outcomesInVivoPET does not rely on manual delineation of organsA machine driven data analysis fully eliminates operator dependent variability and increases data reproducibilityIt will enable the drug development team to quantitate the impact of candidate therapeutics with the highest accuracyreduces the time to enter clinical trialsreduces costsand ensures the quantification and consistency of PET dataThereforethe hypothesis is that the organ SUV can automatically be extracted from PET data using the BCAM and OPMIn Aimwe will modify the BCAM for housing mice with surface protruding tumors and confirm the ability for spatially aligning mice with tumor xenografts to the OPMIn Aimwe will perform PET imaging of tumor bearing mice usingF FDG and confirm the ability for automatically extracting the organ SUV based on the OPMThe successful completion of the proposed project will help to commercialize InVivoPETwhich will be sold as a plug in to existing PET systems and as a PETmanufacturer independent Software as a ServiceSaaSProject NarrativeInVivo Analytics seeks funding for demonstrating the feasibility of automatically analyzing radiotracer biodistributions of small animal positron emission tomographyPETBiodistribution analysis is currently operator dependenttime consumingand prone to error while reducing the reproducibility of study resultsThe proposed technology will be fully automatedoperatorindependentand will facilitate the development of new therapies in small animal models of infectioninflammationand cancer