Enhancement of the signal to noise ratio in functional-anatomical brain patterns obtained by multiple PET to anatomical atlas registration: sensitivity analysis to missing data

We review the function-of-interest method, which is a fast accurate computer method, capable of automatically detecting faint 3-dimensional whole-brain functional patterns in groups of PET metabolic brain images and by projecting them into a brain atlas in order to identify the anatomical structures that support them. A sensitivity analysis of the method is done with respect to missing data, frequently caused by the PET camera's limited field of view.