• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine
• /
• v.38 no.6
• /
• pp.486-491
• /
• 2004

Purpose: factor analysis and independent component analysis (ICA) has been used for handling dynamic image sequences. Theoretical advantages of a newly suggested ICA method, ensemble ICA, leaded us to consider applying this method to the analysis of dynamic myocardial $H_2^{15}O$ PET data. In this study, we quantified patients' blood flow using the ensemble ICA method. Materials and Methods: Twenty subjects underwent $H_2^{15}O$ PET scans using ECAT EXACT 47 scanner and myocardial perfusion SPECT using Vertex scanner. After transmission scanning, dynamic emission scans were initiated simultaneously with the injection of $555{\sim}740$ MBq $H_2^{15}O$. Hidden independent components can be extracted from the observed mixed data (PET image) by means of ICA algorithms. Ensemble learning is a variational Bayesian method that provides an analytical approximation to the parameter posterior using a tractable distribution. Variational approximation forms a lower bound on the ensemble likelihood and the maximization of the lower bound is achieved through minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the true posterior and the variational posterior. In this study, posterior pdf was approximated by a rectified Gaussian distribution to incorporate non-negativity constraint, which is suitable to dynamic images in nuclear medicine. Blood flow was measured in 9 regions - apex, four areas in mid wall, and four areas in base wall. Myocardial perfusion SPECT score and angiography results were compared with the regional blood flow. Results: Major cardiac components were separated successfully by the ensemble ICA method and blood flow could be estimated in 15 among 20 patients. Mean myocardial blood flow was $1.2{\pm}0.40$ ml/min/g in rest, $1.85{\pm}1.12$ ml/min/g in stress state. Blood flow values obtained by an operator in two different occasion were highly correlated (r=0.99). In myocardium component image, the image contrast between left ventricle and myocardium was 1:2.7 in average. Perfusion reserve was significantly different between the regions with and without stenosis detected by the coronary angiography (P<0.01). In 66 segment with stenosis confirmed by angiography, the segments with reversible perfusion decrease in perfusion SPECT showed lower perfusion reserve values in $H_2^{15}O$ PET. Conclusions: Myocardial blood flow could be estimated using an ICA method with ensemble learning. We suggest that the ensemble ICA incorporating non-negative constraint is a feasible method to handle dynamic image sequence obtained by the nuclear medicine techniques.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
• /
• v.5 no.10
• /
• pp.2575-2583
• /
• 1998

The productionof the highly relible softwae systems and theirs performance evaluation hae become important interests in the software industry. The software evaluation has been mainly carried out in ternns of both reliability and performance of software system. Software reliability is the probability that no software error occurs for a fixed time interval during software testing phase. These theoretical software reliability models are sometimes unsuitable for the practical testing phase in which a software error at a certain testing stage occurs by causes of the imperfect debugging, abnornal software correction, and so on. Such a certatin software testing stage needs to be considered as an outlying stage. And we can assume that the software reliability does not improve by means of muisance factor in this outlying testing stage. In this paper, we discuss Bavesian software reliability growth modeling and estimation procedure in the presence of an imidentitied outlying software testing stage by the modification of Jehnski Moranda. Also we derive the Bayes estimaters of the software reliability panmeters by the assumption of prior information under the squared error los function. In addition, we evaluate the proposed software reliability growth model with an unidentified outlying stage in an exchangeable model according to the values of nuisance paramether using the accuracy, bias, trend, noise metries as the quantilative evaluation criteria through the compater simulation.