Diffusion Model-Based Posterior Distribution Prediction for Kinetic Parameter Estimation in Dynamic PET

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a valuable imaging method for studying molecular-level processes in the body, such as hyperphosphorylated tau (p-tau) protein aggregates, a hallmark of several neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease. P-tau density and cerebral perfusion can be quantified from PET data using tracer kinetic modeling techniques. However, noise in PET images leads to uncertainty in the estimated kinetic parameters. This can be quantified in a Bayesian framework by the posterior distribution of kinetic parameters given PET measurements. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques can be employed to estimate the posterior distribution, although with significant computational needs. In this paper, we propose to leverage deep learning inference efficiency to infer the posterior distribution. A novel approach using denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) is introduced. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated on a [18F]MK6240 study and compared to an MCMC method. Our approach offered significant reduction in computation time (over 30 times faster than MCMC) and consistently predicted accurate (< 0.8 % mean error) and precise (< 5.77 % standard deviation error) posterior distributions.