Simultaneous PET/MRI for Connectivity Mapping: Quantitative Methods in Clinical Setting

In recent years, the study of brain connectivity has received growing interest from neuroscience field, from a point of view both of analysis of pathological condition and of a healthy brain. Hybrid PET/MRI scanners are promising tools to study this complex phenomenon. This thesis presents a general framework for the acquisition and analysis of simultaneous multi-modal PET/MRI imaging data to study brain connectivity in a clinical setting. Several aspects are faced ranging from the planning of an acquisition protocol consistent with clinical constraint to the off-line PET image reconstruction, from the selection and implementation of methods for quantifying the acquired data to the development of methodologies to combine the complementary information obtained with the two modalities. The developed analysis framework was applied to two different studies, a first conducted on patients affected by Parkinson’s Disease and dementia, and a second one on high grade gliomas, as proof of concept evaluation that the pipeline can be extended in clinical settings.