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MunichHeart - Image Analysis in Nuclear Medicine

Stephan G. Nekolla, Nuklearmedizinische Klinik der Technischen Universität München

MunichHeart reflects the needs of a group involved both in routine and advanced scientific applications: it is able to handle daily analysis tasks but it also provides the same user interface („look and feel") and presentation tools in advanced applications, thus reducing the need for learning new analysis programs and developing quite general modules repeatedly. The key for success especially in the scientific field is the capability of this software to translate between physiology and physics.

The package is written in IDL with numerically intensive parts implemented in C and C++ and runs on common UNIX workstations. It features a dataflow from program module to module, thus facilitating routine applications, e.g., patient selection, long axis determination, polar map calculation and report page generation for the database. One of the central parts of the package is a reslicer module for the semi-interactive determination of the hearts long axis. Based on this information, all following calculations are performed not in reoriented short axis slices but in the data volume itself. This allows to compare the calculated polar maps to normal databases and to combine them, e.g., in a viability analysis.

The same volumetric sampling modules are used in the processing of dynamic and gated data sets keeping the user interface consistent. Various modelling routines and helpful 3D visualization modules can be applied. For the generation and display of report pages, HTML and VRML were used allowing platform independent access mechanisms with widely available web browsers.

For the efficient analysis in a routine oriented setting, MH offers a variety of analysis protocols, including quantitative analysis and multi-modal image registration and fusion:

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Graphical Layout of the Dynamic Analysis Tool with an NH3 study

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This example shows data from a validation study between MRI late enhancement with the contrast agent Gd-DTPA. As reference, FDG was used: both data sets were coregistered and the polar maps were spatially aligned. The match of reduced FDG uptake and retained MRI contrast agent in the area of scar is clearly delineated.

MunichHeart currently handles ECAT6 and ECAT7 file formats. Optionally, Siemens ICON, Interfile 3.x and DICOM files can be processed. Report pages can be exported in a web compatible way using HTML pages. The PNG graphics format as well as the VRML 3D standard is used.

Stephan Nekolla, researcher at the Nuklearmedizinische Klinik der Technischen Universität München and developer of MunichHeart, points out the key advantages of using IDL for this project:

  • Reduced development time enables fast response to new requirements.
  • This leads to an improved, interdisciplinary research cycle (instrumentation, data analysis, physiology).
  • Platform independence allows the integration of applications on a variety of host computers.
  • The interpreting nature of IDL as compared to compiler based languages offers the possibility to change, adjust and fine tune algorithms "on the fly", without the need to load huge data sets again and again into the application.

MunichHeart was made available to selected international PET sites as part of a research collaboration. Current installations include UCLA Medical School, Los Angeles, the Medical & Pharmaceutical Research Center Foundation, Kanazawa, Japan and research groups in university hospitals in Heidelberg (Germany), Vienna (Austria), Turku (Finland), Pisa and Milano (Italy).