European Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences

METHODS OF SEGMENTATION OF METABOLIC TUMOR VOLUME MEASURED BY POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY

Doaa Ibrahim*, Mohammed Soliman, Esraa Elkholy and Wafaa Abdelhameid

ABSTRACT

PET/CT is a very valuable tool in the follow up of many types of malignancies, SUVmax is the most commonly used PET parameter and represent the voxel of the highest activity within the ROI. However, other parameters as MTV gain an interest in recent studies. Metabolic tumor volume (MTV) is a measurement of the tumor volume with a high metabolism and multiple studies have shown that baseline MTV has prognostic value. Quantification of MTV is time-consuming, especially when performed on patients with disseminated diseases or the metabolically active lesions is overlapped with areas of physiologic uptake of the radiotracer, so there is great interest in automated calculation of MTV. Different imaging processing methods have been developed to define MTV with a widespread interest in the development of automated segmentation algorithms. Numerous PET segmentation algorithms have been developed and applied to FDG PET images which can generally be classified into threshold-based methods and algorithm-based methods.

Keywords: Positron Emission tomography, metabolic tumor volume, tumor segmentation methods.