MR-less high dimensional spatial normalization of (11)C PiB PET images on a population of elderly, mild cognitive impaired and alzheimer disease patients

beta - amyloid (A beta) plaques are one of the neuropathological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and can be quantified using the marker C-11 PiB. As C-11 PiB PET images have limited anatomical information, an Magnetic Resonance Image, (MRI) is usually acquired to perforin the spatial normalization needed for population anaysis. We designed and evaluated a, high dimensional spatial normalization approach that, only use, the, C-11 PiB PET image. The non-rigid registration (NRR) is based oil free form deformation (FFD) modelled using B-splines. To compensate for the limited anatomical information, the FFD is constrained to an allowable transform space using a model trained from MR registrations. A beta deposition is dependent on (diseases staging, so a spatially normalized C PiB PET appearance model selects and refines the atlas. The approach was compared with MR NRR using data from healthy elderly, mild Cognitive impaired and Alzheimer disease participants. Using segmentation propagation, an average, Dice similarity coefficient, of 0.64 and 0.73 was obtained for white and gray matter. The R-squared correlation between the uptake obtained in the frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal was 0.789, 0.843, 0.871 and 0.964. These are very promising results, considering the low of C-11 PiB PET images