An Illustration of the Use of Model-Based Bootstrapping for Evaluation of Uncertainty in Kinetic Information Derived from Dynamic PET

Kinetic mapping via mixture analysis[8], [10] involves comprehensive voxel-level analysis of dynamic PET data. Bootstrapping from the fitted mixture model gives the ability to directly simulate statistical copies of the 4-D PET data, and following suitable analysis, subsequent simulations of the associated kinetic maps. This gives the ability to numerically evaluate uncertainties in inferences associated with kinetic information. We provide a simple introduction to the concept of the model-based bootstrap and an illustration of the use of the approach for kinetic mapping from dynamic PET using results from recent work in Huang et al.[4]. The illustration is from a PET flow-metabolism imaging study in a breast cancer patient. It involves separate dynamic PET imaging following injections of O-15 H2O and F-18 FDG. The bootstrapped data is created in the image domain rather than the projection domain, so there is no reconstruction requirement involved.