| I recently ran accross SPM and am new in your list. I liked SPM for the fact
| that it is written
| in Matlab which is a platform I am very familiar with. At the moment,  I am
| trying to understand 
| what SPM can/can not do. My first general, rather simple, question is:
| 
| Can it be used to process/analyze PET images of the heart?   

A simple question - without a simple answer.

In principle, with a few modifications here and there, it should be able to
do some things with cardiac images, but its applocation to heart data may
not be completely straightforward.

The processing steps within SPM generally begin with something like:

Realignment -> Spatial Normalization -> Smoothing

The realignment module corrects for rigidbody motion of the head. The
assumption that subject movement is rigid body is not bad for most of
the head, but is not quite as reasonable for the chest.

Spatial normalization involves warping images of the different subjects
in the study to the same stereotactic space.  This is done by minimising
the sum of squared difference between the images and a template image of
the head.  In order to do this with cardiac images, you would need to
generate some sort of heart template image.

Smoothing would work - no problem.


The principles that underlie the statistical processing should be valid
for images of the heart.  However, you may wish to think a little bit about
the types of models you use for your data.  In particular, what kind of
pre-processing you would do to your images in order to obtain some form
of parametric image (blood-flow, glucose uptake etc..).  For example, it
may be difficult to distinguish very high blood-flow from blood volume,
and any significant differences you see may not be due to what you think
they are.

Regards,
-John



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