Fully automated 3D basal ganglia activity measurement in dopamine transporter scintigraphy (Spectalyzer).

Objectives: Semiquantitative evaluation of tracer uptake in basal ganglia is superior to visual assessment of images in dopamine transporter (DAT) scintigraphy especially in follow-up of the patients. Manual drawing of regions of interest (ROIs) in two-dimensional (2D) transaxial slices of the single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) datasets leads to a large inter- and intra-reader variability, while being time consuming. Our aim was to investigate a technique that extracts 3D ROIs in a fully automated fashion and thus might provide reproducible user-independent results allowing better follow-up control and large-scale clinical studies.