Investigation of PET/MRI image fusion schemes for enhanced breast cancer diagnosis

The benefit of registration and fusion of functional images with anatomical images is well appreciated in the advent of PET/CT. There is an increasing interest in expanding this approach to PET/MRI. The focus of much of the related research has been on registering images from different modalities. However, the importance of appropriately jointly displaying (i.e. fusing) the registered images has often been neglected and underestimated. Our aim is to determine which fusion techniques are most useful for enhanced diagnostic performance, ease of use, efficiency, and accuracy for reading registered MRI and PET breast images. Preliminary results indicate that the radiologists were better able to perform a series of tasks when reading the fused PET/MRI data sets using color tables generated by our new genetic algorithm, as compared to commonly used fire/gray or red/gray schemes.