Global-two-stage filtering of clinical PET parametric maps: Application to [(11)C]-(R)-PK11195

In Positron Emission Tomography (PET) quantification of physiological parameters at the voxel level may result in unreliable estimates due to the high noise of voxel time activity curves. Global-Two-Stage (GTS), an estimation technique belonging to the group of “population approaches”, can be used to tackle this problem. GTS was previously tested on simulated PET data and yielded substantial improvements when compared to standard estimation approaches such as Weighted NonLinear Least Squares (WNLLS) and Basis Function Method (BFM). In this work GTS performance is assessed in a clinical context using the neuroinflammation marker [11C]-(R)-PK11195 applied to a cohort of Huntington's disease (HD) patients with and without symptoms.