Positron emission tomography (PET) is one of the most frequently used nuclear imaging procedures that provides metabolic and functional information of physiological activity at the molecular and cellular level by displaying the concentration distribution of radioisotope labeled tracer which pre-injected into the human or animal body before imaging process. PET has shown great superiority in clinical studies of oncology, cardiology and neurology, as well as in pre-clinical studies of small-animal imaging, gene engineering and drug development. Dynamic PET imaging usually involves the collection of a series of frames of image data over contiguous time intervals (4-d data: 3-d space + 1-d time), immediately after injection of the radioisotope labeled tracer. Dynamic PET imaging can be used to study the tracer distribution process in vivo over time and quantitatively estimate physiological parameters, which provides some remarkable advantages over static imaging, such as early diagnosis, staging and therapy monitoring of cancer, drug development and so on. 2-Deoxy-2-18<上标!>F-Fluoro-D-glucose (FDG), as a glucose analog, is the most commonly used PET tracer and has been used to provide a noninvasive quantitative approach to measure the glucose utilization rates in vivo. Dynamic FDG-PET images describe the dynamic behaviors of FDG in different tissue, but not the quantitative index: glucose metabolic rates (the number of milligrams of glucose consumption per 100ml per minute) if the images are not further processed. With the quantitative analysis technology, the physiology and pathophysiology parameters can be extracted to accurate evaluate the metabolism and function of the organs which helps to improve the classification accuracy of different kinds of diseases. Focusing on quantitative analysis algorithms in dynamic FDG-PET studies, we summed some major difficulties below: 1) In dynamic FDG-PET imaging, several approaches to determine kinetic parameters have been proposed continuously in recent years. However, there is not a unified conclusion on how to select an appropriate method under different situations, or the effect of different noise levels, scan lengths, and weighting schedules. Some researchers have evaluated several methods used in dynamic FDG-PET imaging. However, these historical evaluations were not investigated under the same configuration, or some conclusions have led to some confusion in whether or how best to apply these method...
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