Visualization of whole body PET images

Whole body PET (WB-PET) is used routinely as a clinical procedure for detection of primary and metastatic lesions. In the standard imaging protocol, up to 500 transaxial images are produced. To facilitate viewing of the large data set, only a limited set of coronal and sagittal cross sectional images are used for diagnostic review. Since these images only represent a sub-set of the entire image volume, it is desirable to develop visualization tools that would allow viewing of the full data set. A second factor that makes localization of lesions in WB-PET difficult is the fact that the emission images contain little or no anatomical information. A means to provide some level of anatomical orientation can be obtained from the transmission images. Here, the authors present a visualization package which allows 3-D visualization of the entire WB-PET image set, using surface rendering and image fusion techniques. The software allows real-time, simultaneous, reslicing of the emission and transmission data into arbitrary coronal and sagittal cross sectional slices. The package also provides near real time, 3-D rendering of transmission data, and merging of emission and transmission data. The software is based on the IDL visualization package and is currently implemented on a SUN SPARC^TM 10/41