Scan software

摘要

Philips research is claiming a breakthrough in medical diagnostics after interpreting positron emission tomography (PET) brain scan images to identify various forms of dementia. The Hamburg-based project is claimed to enhance one of the most effective techniques, called FDG-PET, for diagnosing early-stage dementia, which is performed using a PET brain scan with the tracer fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG).rnIt arose from work involving Philips and doctors at the University Medical Centre Hamburg, who had observed that while FDG-PET images give high-grade diagnostic information, clinicians need considerable expertise in nuclear medicine imagery and brain anatomy to interpret them. In an attempt to help, Philips researchers combined their capabilities in decision support software, imaging technology and image analysis software. Philips scientist Stewart Young said: 'The system contains a database of scans of people with healthy brains, and patients with particular verified diseases - Alzheimer's, frontotemporal dementia or Lewy body dementia. Following a scan, the software compares the patient's image to this database by aligning the images, then computing a simple set of numbers which indicates the similarity of patterns in the patient's brain to the patterns in the database.' The software presents two results to the user. The first is a picture of the brain overlaid in blue with regions where disease has been detected. The second is a set of figures giving an estimate of how close the patterns seen in the image are to the disease pattern.