Semi-automatic localization of parathyroid tumors in dynamic sestamibi scintigrams

Parathyroid scintigraphy is considered to be an important method of preoperative imaging which enables localization of parathyroid tumors. Submarine method that uses images obtained by standard dynamic sestamibi scintigraphy has proved to be effective in case of typical pitfalls of existing scintigraphic methods. In this paper we described a developed Matlab interface that enables evaluation of algorithms for automatic application of Submarine method. We also suggested an algorithm for automatic extraction the whole thyroid region from the background radioactivity. Finally, we investigated the localization and visualization of parathyroid tumors based on estimation of exponential decreasing trend of time activity curves. The algorithm developed in Matlab environment was tested on a group of 20 patients with histologically proven parathyroid lesions.