Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

This multidisciplinary research project proposes to develop a decision support system to assist medical personnel. The system will  reconstruct, display and analyze dynamic nuclear medicine images. It will include iterative reconstruction of the dynamic data, real-time visualization of four-dimensional images, tools for parametric segmentation of the data and their quantitative analysis as well as novel user interfaces. The method will provide quantitatively accurate diagnostic information, yet be fast, simple, intuitive and practical. An innovative multidisciplinary research development environment will enable our partners to participate directly in the development of novel algorithms for reconstruction, feature extraction and visualization. This is a key feature of our system. This tight integration of the algorithms to be developed will enable information from the analysis stage to be fed back into the reconstruction stage, improving the overall result. This approach will provide the medical user with a simple and intuitive access to functional patient images acquired using standard clinical equipment and enhance their diagnostic power. Although our methods will be general and applicable to different dynamic clinical situations, the particular focus of this project is on cardiac and oncological applications of dynamic single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) studies. We postulate that the use of temporal in addition to 3D spatial information will enhance diagnosis by allowing more accurate identification of myocardial perfusion defects and better separation of liver tissue overlapping that of the heart in SPECT images. This technique has the ability to bring many of the benefits of molecular imaging currently being utilized in the much more expensive and limited Positron Tomography centers to the level of the community hospital, extending the revolutionary breakthroughs in advanced imaging and biotechnology in cancer, neurology, and cardiac disease to thousands of additional Canadians. Our partners are Philips Medical Systems and Dynapix Intelligence Imaging.