Registration of dynamic dopamine D2 receptor images using principal component analysis

This paper describes a novel technique for registering a dynamic sequence of single-photon emission tomography (SPET) dopamine D₂ receptor images, using principal component analysis (PCA). Conventional methods for registering images, such as count difference and correlation coefficient algorithms, fail to take into account the dynamic nature of the data, resulting in large systematic errors when registering time-varying images. However, by using principal component analysis to extract the temporal structure of the image sequence, misregistration can be quantified by examining the distribution of eigenvalues. The registration procedures were tested using a computer-generated dynamic phantom derived from a high-resolution magnetic resonance image of a realistic brain phantom. Each method was also applied to clinical SPET images of dopamine D₂ receptors, using the ligands iodine-123 iodobenzamide and iodine-123 epidepride, to investigate the influence of misregistration on kinetic modelling parameters and the binding potential. The PCA technique gave highly significant (P<0.001) improvements in image registration, leading to alignment errors in x and y of about 25% of the alternative methods, with reductions in autocorrelations over time. It could also be applied to align image sequences which the other methods failed completely to register, particularly ¹²³I-epidepride scans. The PCA method produced data of much greater quality for subsequent kinetic modelling, with an improvement of nearly 50% in the χ ² of the fit to the compartmental model, and provided superior quality registration of particularly difficult dynamic sequences. Received 1 August and in revised form 21 August 1997