3D Striatum reconstruction of 123Ioflupane SPECT images for quantitative assessments on the dopaminergic neurotransmission system

In this paper we propose a machine vision system for automatic segmentation of striatum in SPECT images. Moreover, in order to perform quantitative measurements on the dopaminergic neurotransmission system a 3D Striatum reconstruction method is proposed, which iteratively computes the position of every single vertex of an initial sphere according to the composition of external and internal forces derived from the input images. The system was tested on a set of 20 patients affected by Parkinson disease in order to evaluate its performance in the disease progression assessment.