3D Oncological PET volume analysis using CNN and LVQNN

The increasing numbers of patient scans and the prevailing application of positron emission tomography (PET) in clinical oncology have led to a need for efficient PET volume handling and the development of new volume analysis approaches to aid clinicians in the diagnosis of disease and planning of treatment. A novel automated system for oncological PET volume segmentation is proposed in this paper. The proposed intelligent system is using competitive neural network (CNN) and learning vector quantisation neural network (LVQNN) for clustering and quantifying phantom and real PET volumes. Bayesian information criterion (BIC) has been used in this system to assess the optimal number of clusters for each PET data set. The experimental study using phantom PET volume was conducted for quantitative evaluation of the performance of the proposed segmentation algorithm. The analysis of the resulting segmentation of clinical oncological PET data seems to confirm that this approach shows promise and can successfully segment patient lesion.