Enhanced Detection in Brain Activation Maps Using a Multifiltering Approach

Abstract

Current methods for detecting activation foci in positron emission tomography difference images include a low pass filtering step aimed at improving the signal-to-noise ratio. However, we show that detection sensitivity depends both on the activation signal and the filter sizes. Therefore, we propose to improve current detection methods by using a multifiltering strategy that is shown to be more sensitive when various kinds of signals are present in the brain activation images.