Automated seeds location for whole body NaF PET segmentation

18F-labeled NaF, also called [/sup 18/F] fluoride ion, positron emission tomography (NaF PET) is a specific imaging modality of bone activity and allows bone tumor detection. In this paper, we propose a fast-automated method to locate anatomical structures by special planes and seeds in whole body NaF PET images. This step is crucial in registration and segmentation processes such as region growing. Our method proceeds in two steps: first, it delineates anatomical objects such as bladder, head, spine and legs with two horizontal planes (bottom and top); secondly, it determines labeled seeds in these objects. Processes are based on the analysis of the slice energy (SE) and the computation of the center of gravity (CG) of all transverse slices. This method was applied to initialize seeds in order to segment the whole skeleton. This segmentation is necessary to detect bone tumors and quantify bone uptake. Results are fast and quite satisfying. Robustness of our method was positively tested on a set of eight NaF PET images.