ACQI members have recently collaborated with Cardiologists to undertake and publish a study in the International Journal of Cardiac Imaging to automatically identify blood vessels surrounding the heart. This is in order to re-purpose the PET imaging tracer 68Ga-Octeotrate, traditionally used for identifying tumours of the neuroendocrine system, for use in identifying and tracking cardiac atherosclerosis. Nuclear Medicine advanced trainee Reece Parry led analysis of retrospectively-collected imaging data for neuroendocrine tumour patients. With the assistance of ACQI researchers, deep learning methods were developed and tested for the automated delineation of cardiac vessels. This opens the door to consistent quantitative characterisation of calcification of coronary vessels for establishing cardiac health risk and predicting future risk.
Australian Centre for Quantitative Imaging 