5. PET Imaging of Neurotransmitter Systems: access and pre-processing

COEX 

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a powerful imaging technique to measure biological targets of interest in the living human brain. In particular, the interest in dynamic PET data focusing on neurotransmitter systems is rapidly increasing with the generation and release of freely available neuroreceptor maps from various receptor systems (GABA, dopamine, serotonin etc.) to the neuroimaging community in both healthy and diseased conditions, and/or during pharmacological interventions.
In this first part of the PET Imaging of Neurotransmitter Systems tutorial, I will go through how these neuroreceptor maps can be generated (focusing on the serotonin transporter using the radiotracer [11C]DASB), ranging from download of open data (from OpenNeuro) and preprocessing such as motion correction, registration, and segmentation. I will also cover the newest developments in open-source software for accessing and preprocessing of PET data (e.g. PETSurfer and PETPrep), ultimately providing the attendee with all the necessary skills to develop their own PET pipeline, generate neuroreceptor maps, and share these valuable resources back to the community.