Construction of Deformable Trunk Atlas of Chinese Human Based on Multiple PET/CT Images: Preliminary Results

Large number of Chinese people have taken PET/CT health screening during the last decade, resulting in thousands of PET/CT images of healthy subjects stored in the hospital databases all over the country. The purpose of this study is to collect PET/CT images of healthy Chinese people and construct digital atlases of trunk region based on a relatively large sample set. Compared to the traditional digital human atlases built from cryosection image of a single subject, the atlases of this study include anatomical and functional information of various living subjects. The technique of statistical shape models is used to model the inter-subject organ shape deformation across the population, therefore the atlas is named “the deformable atlas”. This study also aims to measure the anatomical parameters (from CT images) and functional metabolism parameters (from PET images) of Chinese adults with different sexes, ages, and weights. The reconstructed statistical shape models reveal major anatomical variations among the population. We also found significant differences between male and female in different age groups through statistical analysis of organs volumes and CT values in skeleton. The obtained models and parameters will support the applications of education, anatomy-based simulation, knowledge-based medical image analysis and etc.