Identifying hypometabolism in PET images of the brain: Application to epilepsy

A technique for identifying hypometabolism from Positron Emission Tomography (PET) brain images, which accounts for patient-specific anatomical variations, scanner physical properties, and expected normal variances in metabolism, has been developed and used to identify unilateral temporal lobe seizure foci in epileptics. This method was able to distinguish the epileptogenic focus in three seizure patients with unilateral seizure onset, while demonstrating no hypometabolism in three patients with bilateral seizure onset or in the ten normal volunteers.