Numerical analysis method and system of brain tau protein images, and feature extraction templates suitable for the system

Abstract

Global Tau severity (gTS) system analyzes the Tau PET signals for measuring Tau protein trajectory that embedded with a brain region registration step, a feature extraction step, and a numeric scoring step. At the brain region registration step, the PET image is registered, transformed and normalized to the template space. At the feature extraction step, a standardized uptake value ratio procedure using predefined white matter reference is utilized to quantify the amount of tracer uptake in predefined neurodegenerative category. Next, a disease-specific template (gTS mask) is used to extract the Tau accumulation regions, resulting in a feature-extracted brain image for a specific disease. Finally at the numerical scoring step, the gTS score for each mask is calculated based on the results of the feature-extracted mask. Based on different disease templates and threshold, this score could be inferred for specific disease status and stage.

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