Comparison of MR-less PiB SUVR quantification methods

Pierrick Bourgeat*, Victor L. Villemagne, Vincent Dore, Belinda Brown, S. Lance Macaulay, Ralph Martins, Colin L. Masters, David Ames, Kathryn Ellis, Christopher C. Rowe, Olivier Salvado, Jurgen Fripp, The AIBL Research Group

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

104 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

11C-Pittsburgh compound B (PiB) is a positron emission tomography (PET) tracer designed to bind to amyloid-β (Aβ) plaques, one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The potential of PiB as an earlymarker of AD led to the increasing use of PiB in clinical research studies and development of several F-18-labeled Aβ radiotracers. Automatic quantification of PiB images requires an accurate parcellation of the brain's gray matter (GM). Typically, this relies on a coregistered magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) toextract the cerebellar GM, compute the standardized uptake value ratio (SUVR), and provide parcellation and segmentation for quantification of regional and global SUVR. However, not all subjects can undergo MRI, in which case, an MR-less method is desirable. In this study, we assess 3 PET-only quantification methods: a mean atlas, an adaptive atlas, and a multi-atlas approaches on a database of 237 subjects having been imaged with both PiB PET and MRI. The PET-only methods were compared against MR-based SUVR quantification and evaluated in terms of correlation, average error, and performance in classifying subjects with low and high Aβ deposition. The mean atlas method suffered from a significant bias between the estimated neocortical SUVR and the PiB status, resulting in an overall error of 5.6% (R2= 0.98), compared with the adaptive and multi-atlas approaches that had errors of 3.06% and 2.74%, respectively (R2= 0.98), and no significant bias. In classifying PiB-negative from PiB-positive subjects, the mean atlas had 10 misclassified subjects compared with 0 for the adaptive and 1 for the multi-atlas approach. Overall, the adaptive and the multi-atlas approaches performed similarly well against the MR-based quantification and would be a suitable replacements for PiB quantification when no MRI is available.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)S159-S166
Number of pages8
JournalNeurobiology of Aging
Volume36
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2015
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Alzheimer's disease
  • PET quantification
  • Pittsburgh compound B

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