A practical PET/CT data visualization method with dual-threshold PET colorization and image fusion.

Multi-modal medical imaging has emerged as a general trend in clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. In recent years, great efforts have been made to investigate and develop dual-modality scanners, among which PET/CT is the most widespread one in clinical practice. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective PET/CT data visualization method that can integrate these two modalities into composite data for better observation. The proposed method consists of three main steps. First, a PET data colorization approach is presented based on a dual-threshold scheme, which applies a pair of high and low thresholds to colorize the PET image. Then, to extract functional information from the PET image more adequately, unlike traditional blending fashion that directly uses the CT image as underlay, we merge the CT and the PET images with a Laplacian pyramid (LP)-based image fusion approach to generate the underlay. Finally, the visualization result is obtained by blending the fused image and the colorized PET image. Experiments are conducted on 5 sets of PET/CT scans that contain 200 paired slices in total. The ClearCanvas software and the method using the presented PET colorization approach but with the CT image as underlay are adopted for comparison. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve more promising performance in terms of both visual perception and quantitative assessment. The code of the proposed method has been made available online athttps://github.com/yuliu316316/Visualization.