TY - JOUR T1 - Automated program for analyzing striatal uptake of DaTSCAN SPECT images in humans suspected of Parkinson's disease JF - Journal of Nuclear Medicine JO - J Nucl Med SP - 2098 LP - 2098 VL - 52 IS - supplement 1 AU - George Zubal AU - Gary Wisniewski AU - Kenneth Marek AU - John Seibyl Y1 - 2011/05/01 UR - http://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/52/supplement_1/2098.abstract N2 - 2098 Objectives Reliable quantitative dopamine transporter imaging is critical for early and accurate diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Image quantitation is made difficult by the variability introduced by manual interventions during the quantitative processing steps. A fully automated objective striatal analysis program was applied to dopamine transporter DaTSCAN images acquired from subjects with early symptoms of suspected Parkinsonism and compared with manual analysis by a trained image-processing technologist. Methods DaTSCAN SPECT scans were obtained from subjects recruited to participate in a sponsored clinical study. Data acquired from various remote sites were reconstructed and then analyzed using an in-house package of MATLAB scripts (Objective Striatal Analysis, OSA) that reorients the SPECT brain volume to the standard geometry of an average scan, automatically locates the striata and occipital structures, locates the caudate and putamen, and calculates the background subtracted striatal binding ratio (SBR). The SBR calculated by OSA was compared with manual analysis by a trained image-processing technologist. Several parameters were varied in the automated analysis, including the number of summed transverse slices and the size and separation of the regions of interest applied to the caudate and putamen to determine the optimum OSA analysis. The parameters giving SBR with the closest correlation to the manual analysis were accepted as optimal. Results The optimal comparison between the SBR obtained by the human analyst and that obtained by the automated OSA analysis yielded a correlation coefficient of over 0.9. Conclusions Our optimized OSA delivers SBR evaluations that closely correlate with a similar evaluation manually applied by a highly trained image-processing technologist ER -