Coregistration of Small Animal PET and Autoradiography for in vivo-ex vivo Comparison

Soo-Min Song, Min-Jeong Kim, Joung-Min Lee, Hye-Jin Park, KyeongMin Kim, Gi-Jeong Cheon, Myoung-Hee Kim

Abstract: Non-invasive imaging of small animal and its quantification techniques are needed to be evaluated by comparison with ex vivo image. To overcome the existing method, hand-operated comparison with the unaided eye observation, we present an algorithm that matches the target area in PET scanned in vivo with an autoradiography image acquired ex vivo. We applied a coregistration algorithm that uses voxel similarity to find the corresponding slices and to make quantitative measurements. Automatic matching of in vivo and ex vivo images is novel, and can provide better validation than manual matching techniques.