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Uspet: Unsupervised Segmentation Of Pet Images

Jaakkola, M.; Karpijoki, H.; Saari, T.; Rainio, O.; Li, A.; Knuuti, J.; Virtanen, K.; Klen, R.

2025-12-15 health informatics
10.64898/2025.12.15.25342254 medRxiv
Show abstract

BackgroundSegmentation is a routine, yet time-consuming and subjective step in the analysis of positron emission tomography (PET) images. Automatic methods to do it have been suggested, but recent method development has focused on supervised approaches. The previously published unsupervised segmentation methods for PET images are outdated for the arising dynamic human total-body PET images now enabled by the evolving scanner technology. MethodsIn this study, we introduce an unsupervised general purpose automatic segmentation method for modern PET images consisting of tens of millions of voxels. We provide its implementation in an easy-to-use format and demonstrate its performance on two datasets of real human total-body images scanned using different radiotracers. Results and conclusionsOur results show that the suggested method can identify functionally distinct areas within the anatomical organs. Combined with anatomical segments obtained from other imaging modalities, this enables great potential to improve clinically meaningful segmentation and reduce time-consuming manual work.

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