Do you need a tool for measuring PET/CT?


The DICOM files of this case come from OsiriX website.

What's new

DOWNLOAD Application

The latest version is released on October 9, 2018.

Download sample DICOM files (DICOM format, a no-disease case)

System requirement

Windows 7, 8.x, 10 with .NET Framework 4.5.2 or later.

Sorry, Metavol currently does not work on Mac OS or Linux.

Metavol is light software and does not require a high-spec computer.

Metavol can be used at no fee.

The entire source code (sorry old version only) of Metavol is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/metavol/.

FEATURES

Metavol can be used either as a simple PET-CT viewer or as an advanced PET-CT image analyzer.

Why we started this project

    I, Kenji Hirata, have been working as a nuclear medicine physician in Japan. Since I started working in 2002, the de facto standard to quantify the intensity of FDG uptake in the tumor has been no doubt SUVmax due to its high inter-operator reproducibility and easy-to-implement feature. Recently, in clinical oncology, increasing lines of evidence have been accumulated to demonstrate the importance of metabolic tumor volume (MTV) for patient care such as treatment response evaluation and prognosis prediction. MTV is a total volume within a boundary determined with a particular threshold (e.g., SUV > 3, SUV > reference tissue, or SUV > 40% of SUVmax). Total lesion glycolysis (TLG) is a product of MTV and SUVmean within the boundary.

    However, in clinical settings, the use of MTV or TLG is quite limited. As far as I know, there are few institutes or hospitals that regularly measure these parameters and write them on diagnostic reports. I think there are at least two reasons: 1) measuring them requires time and labor of experts; 2) the measured parameters have variability between observers because of manual interaction.

    Therefore, I tried to conquer these limitations by developing a software tool that has new techniques. Fortunately, I have used the programming language C# for years. I got started with this project in May 2013. It took time, but it has been fun for me. I would be happy if the tool is used by many people, especially busy physicians, to extract 100% information from FDG PET-CT by measuring tumor volume without spending long time.

Known Problems

Future Perspective

Possible functions the future version of this software will be


Question?

Ask Kenji Hirata, MD, PhD (Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan)

Email to metavol@pop.med.hokudai.ac.jp

Why not like us at Facebook?