MR-less surface-based amyloid estimation by subject-specific atlas selection and Bayesian fusion

Abstract

For clinical evaluation, assessing amyloid deposition with PiB-PET is desirable without requiring MR acquisition and associated fusion/segmentation techniques. A useful clinical tool is to estimate PiB-PET against the brain surface, which is however challenging using PET alone because of the lack of structural information. We propose a method to generate such estimate, where multiple atlases are selected and combined with local weights in a Bayesian framework. Qualitative and quantitative comparison with and without MRI are presented. Using PET only, the average error on the brain surface was around 13% compared to MRI-dependant method.