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In current practice, it is common in medical diagnosis or treatment monitoring for a patient to require multiple examinations using different imaging techniques. Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and computed tomography (CT) are good at providing anatomical information. Three-dimensional functional information about tissues and organs is often obtained with radionuclide imaging modalities: positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission tomography (SPET). In nuclear medicine, such techniques must contend with poor spatial resolution, poor counting statistics of functional images and the lack of correspondence between the distribution of the radioactive tracer and anatomical boundaries. Information gained from anatomical and functional images is usually of a complementary nature. Since the patient cannot be relied on to assume exactly the same pose at different times and possibly in different scanners, spatial alignment of images is needed. In this thesis, a general framework for image registration is presented, in which the optimum alignment corresponds to a maximum of a similarity measure. Particular attention is drawn to entropy-based measures, and variance-based measures. These similarity measures include mutual information, normalized mutual information and correlation ratio which are the ones being considered in this study. In multimodality image registration between functional and anatomical images, these measures manifest superior performance compared to feature-based measures. A common characteristic of these measures is the use of the joint-intensity histogram, which is needed to estimate the joint probability and the marginal probability of the images. A novel similarity measure is proposed, the symmetric correlation ratio (SCR), which is a simple extension of the correlation ratio measure. Experiments were performed to study questions pertaining to the optimization of the registration process. For example, do these measures produce similar registration accuracy in the non-brain region as in the brain? Does the performance of SPET-CT registration depend on the choice of the reconstruction method (FBP or OSEM)? The joint-intensity based similarity measures were examined and compared using clinical data with real distortions and digital phantoms with synthetic distortions. In automatic SPET-MR rigid-body registration applied to clinical brain data, a global mean accuracy of 3.9 mm was measured using external fiducial markers. SCR performed better than mutual information when sparse sampling was used to speed up the registration process. Using the Zubal phantom of the thoracic-abdominal region, SPET projections for Methylenediphosponate (MDP) and Gallium-67 (67Ga) studies were simulated for 360 degree data, accounting for noise, attenuation and depth-dependent resolution. Projection data were reconstructed using conventional filtered back projection (FBP) and accelerated maximum likelihood reconstruction based on the use of ordered subsets (OSEM). The results of SPET-CT rigid-body registration of the thoracic-abdominal region revealed that registration accuracy was insensitive to image noise, irrespective of which reconstruction method was used. The registration accuracy, to some extent, depended on which algorithm (OSEM or FBP) was used for SPET reconstruction. It was found that, for roughly noise-equivalent images, OSEM-reconstructed SPET produced better registration than FBP-reconstructed SPET when attenuation compensation (AC) was included but this was less obvious for SPET without AC. The results suggest that OSEM is the preferable SPET reconstruction algorithm, producing more accurate rigidbody image registration when AC is used to remove artifacts due to non-uniform attenuation in the thoracic region. Registration performance deteriorated with decreasing planar projection count. The presence of the body boundary in the SPET image and matching fields of view were shown not to affect the registration performance substantially but pre-processing steps such as CT intensity windowing did improve registration accuracy. Non-rigid registration based on SCR was also investigated. The proposed algorithm for non-rigid registration is based on overlapping image blocks defined on a 3D grid pattern and a multi-level strategy. The transformation vector field, representing image deformation is found by translating each block so as to maximize the local similarity measure. The resulting sparsely sampled vector field is interpolated using a Gaussian function to ensure a locally smooth transformation. Comparisons were performed to test the effectiveness of SCR, MI and NMI in 3D intra- and inter-modality registration. The accuracy of the technique was evaluated on digital phantoms and on patient data. SCR demonstrated a better non-rigid registration than MI when sparse sampling was used for image block matching. For the high-resolution MR-MR image of brain region, the proposed algorithm was successful, placing 92% of image voxels within less than or equal to 2 voxels of the true position. Where one of the images had low resolution (e.g. in CT-SPET, MR-SPET registration), the accuracy and robustness deteriorated profoundly. In the current implementation, a 3D registration process takes about 10 minutes to complete on a stand alone Pentium IV PC with 1.7 GHz CPU and 256 Mbytes random access memory on board.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Technology, Sydney, 2004. / Bibliography: leaves 238-269.

Thesis (MSc.(Chemistry))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. S.)--Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2006. / Nolan Hertel, Committee Chair ; John Aarsvold, Committee Co-Chair ; Rebecca Howell, Committee Member.

Dose as a result of radiation exposure is the notion generally used to disclose the imparted energy in a volume of tissue to a potential biological effect. The basic unit defined by the international system of units (SI system) is the radiation absorbed dose, which is expressed as the mean imparted energy in a mass element of the tissue known as "gray" (Gy) or J/kg. The procedure for ascertaining the absorbed dose is complicated since it involves the radiation transport of numerous types of charged particles and coupled photon interactions. The most precise method is to perform a full 3D Monte Carlo simulation of the radiation transport. There are various Monte Carlo toolkits that have tool compartments for dose calculations and measurements. The dose studies in this thesis were performed using the GEANT4 Application for Emission Tomography (GATE) software (Janet al., 2011) GATE simulation toolkit has been used extensively in the medical imaging community, due to the fact that it uses the full capabilities of GEANT4. It also utilizes an easy to-learn GATE macro language, which is more accessible than learning the GEANT4/C++ programming language. This work combines GATE with digital phantoms generated using the NCAT (NURBS-based cardiac-torso phantom) toolkit (Segars et al., 2004) to allow efficient and effective estimation of 3D radiation dose maps. The GATE simulation tool has developed into a beneficial tool for Monte Carlo simulations involving both radiotherapy and imaging experiments. This work will present an overview of absorbed dose of common radionuclides used in nuclear medicine and serve as a guide to a user who is setting up a GATE simulation for a PET and SPECT study.

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Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:25:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T14:03:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 06873.pdf: 3893215 bytes, checksum: 6d198b442dc331f7ee99c5eb2cd23c10 (MD5) / Dissertacao (Mestrado) / IPEN/D / Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares - IPEN/CNEN-SP

Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:54:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T14:09:27Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 12752.pdf: 1446592 bytes, checksum: bbd9a40baa2d04acc21669d03e871456 (MD5) / Neste trabalho foram desenvolvidas as técnicas para projetar e implantar um sistema automatizado de controle e aquisição de dados para o arranjo de calibração em radiação X níveis diagnóstico e radioproteção do Laboratório de Calibração de Instrumentos (LCI) do IPEN. Os programas desenvolvidos fornecem diretamente os valores de kerma corrigidos para as condições ambientais. A automatização do obturador viabilizou a temporização precisa de exposições de curta duração. A utilização da câmara monitora como padrão de calibração beneficiou-se de um programa para a determinação de seus fatores de calibração a partir de uma câmara de referência para as diferentes qualidades de feixe. Foram utilizados como instrumentos de referência, dois eletrômetros, um para a câmara monitora, e outro para a câmara padrão; um termômetro de dois canais, e um barômetro absoluto, todos comunicando-se com o microcomputador através de interface padrão RS-232. São descritos os métodos computacionais utilizados nos programas de controle do kerma pela câmara monitora, bem como no de obtenção de seus fatores de calibração. A linguagem de programação adotada (LabVIEW MR) permitiu a obtenção de resultados rápidos e adequados. Os resultados obtidos demonstraram que o novo sistema proposto está apto a substituir as técnicas anteriormente adotadas no LCI, com vantagens no que diz respeito à rapidez e precisão na execução das calibrações, notadamente sob situações adversas, como as observadas em exposições muito curtas, ou então longas o suficiente para que sejam substancialmente afetadas pela flutuação de parâmetros tais como a taxa de kerma do gerador de raios X, ou então pelas condições ambientais de temperatura e pressão. / Dissertação (Mestrado) / IPEN/D / Instituto de Pesquisas Energéticas e Nucleares - IPEN/CNEN-SP