Development of an Interactive GUI Tool for Thyroid Uptake Studies using Gamma Camera

Thyroid uptake study is a technique that requires injection of a radio-isotope/radiotracer emitting gamma rays into the blood stream of the patient to study the functionality of thyroid in accordance to its uptake. The Gamma Camera uses a LEAP (Low Energy All Purpose) collimator which handles only photons emitted from radio-isotopes having lower emission energies. Technetium-99m is used whose energy of emission is around 140 keV. For a typical Thyroid Uptake Probe where Iodine-131 having greater emission energy of 364 keV is preferred, but existing Thyroid Uptake software is not feasible. Therefore an Interactive GUI (Graphical User Interface) tool was developed using Fiji for determination of tracer uptake by manually drawing the Region of Interest around left and right thyroid lobes separately. Developed tool was tested on 35 real time thyroid cases and the uptake values obtained are compared with those obtained from the existing software tool.