Diagnosis of regional cerebral blood flow abnormalities using SPECT: agreement between individualized statistical parametric maps and visual inspection by nuclear medicine physicians with different levels of expertise in nuclear neurology

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Visual analysis is widely used to interpret regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) SPECT images in clinical practice despite its limitations. Automated methods are employed to investigate between-group rCBF differences in research studies but have rarely been explored in individual analyses. OBJECTIVES: To compare visual inspection by nuclear physicians with the automated statistical parametric mapping program using a SPECT dataset of patients with neurological disorders and normal control images. METHODS: Using statistical parametric mapping, 14 SPECT images from patients with various neurological disorders were compared individually with a databank of 32 normal images using a statistical threshold of p<0.05 (corrected for multiple comparisons at the level of individual voxels or clusters). Statistical parametric mapping results were compared with visual analyses by a nuclear physician highly experienced in neurology (A) as well as a nuclear physician with a general background of experience (B) who independently classified images as normal or altered, and determined the location of changes and the severity. RESULTS: Of the 32 images of the normal databank, 4 generated maps showing rCBF abnormalities (p<0.05, corrected). Among the 14 images from patients with neurological disorders, 13 showed rCBF alterations. Statistical parametric mapping and physician A completely agreed on 84.37% and 64.28% of cases from the normal databank and neurological disorders, respectively. The agreement between statistical parametric mapping and ratings of physician B were lower (71.18% and 35.71%, respectively). CONCLUSION: Statistical parametric mapping replicated the findings described by the more experienced nuclear physician. This finding suggests that automated methods for individually analyzing rCBF SPECT images may be a valuable resource to complement visual inspection in clinical practice.