NMF on Positron Emission Tomography

In positron emission tomography, kinetic modelling of brain tracer uptake, metabolism or binding requires knowledge of the cerebral input function. Traditionally, this is achieved with arterial blood sampling in the arm or as shown in (Liptrot, M, et al., 2004) by non-invasive K-means clustering. We propose another method to estimate time-activity curves (TAC) extracted directly from dynamic positron emission tomography (PET) scans by non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). Since the scaling of the basis curves is lost in the NMF the estimated TAC is scaled by a vector alpha which is calculated from the NMF solution. The method is tested on a [¹⁸F]-Altanserin tracer ligand data set consisting of 5 healthy subjects. The results from using K-means clustering and NMF are compared to a sampled arterial TAC. The comparison is done by calculating the correlation with the arterial sampled TAC.