TY - THES U1 - Master Thesis A1 - Mercea, Paul T1 - Quantification of longitudinal tumor changes using PET imaging in 3D Slicer N2 - Quantitative assessment of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging can be used for diagnosis and staging of tumors and monitoring of response in cancer treatment. In clinical practice, PET analysis is based on normalized indices such as those based on the Standardized Uptake Value (SUV). Although largely evaluated, these indices are considered quite unstable mainly because of the simplicity of their experimental protocol. Development and validation of more sophisticated methods for the purposes of clinical research require a common open platform that can be used both for prototyping and sharing of the analysis methods, and for their evaluation by clinical users. This work was motivated by the lack of such platform for longitudinal quantitative PET analysis. By following a prototype driven software development approach, an open source tool for quantitative analysis of tumor changes based on multi-study PET image data has been implemented. As a platform for this work, 3D Slicer 4, a free open source software application for medical image computing has been chosen. For the analysis and quantification of PET data, the implemented software tool guides the user through a series of workflow steps. In addition to the implementation of a guided workflow, the software was made extensible by integration of interfaces for the enhancement of segmentation and PET quantification algorithms. By offering extensibility, the PET analysis software tool was transformed into a platform suitable for prototyping and development of PET-specific segmentation and quantification methods. The accuracy, efficiency and usability of the platform were evaluated in reproducibility and usability studies. The results achieved in these studies demonstrate that the implemented longitudinal PET analysis software tool fulfills all requirements for the basic quantification of tumors in PET imaging and at the same time provides an efficient and easy to use workflow. Furthermore, it can function as a platform for prototyping of PET-specific segmentation and quantification methods, which in the future can be incorporated in the workflow. KW - Quantifizierung KW - Tumor KW - Bildgebung KW - 3D Slicer Y2 - 2013 U6 - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:840-opus-688 UN - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:840-opus-688 ER -