This research aims to study the concentration change of the radioactive substance 18F-FDOPA, which is the
key method to diagnose the Parkinson’s disease (PD), using the diffusion equation. The model aims at approximating
the concentration over the brain region called striatum. From the PET/CT images of the whole brain, the striatum site
was segmented using the Otsu’s method. The region obtained from the segmentation is then used as the domain for our
diffusion model. We then adopt the ADI method of [17] to the non-rectangular domain. The diffusion parameters are
improved by mean of the pattern search method to best fit with the true data. After comparing the numerical solution
at the final timestep with the actual data, we can finally be positive that our diffusion model is consistent with the
actual data and lead to the same diagnosis of the Parkinson’s disease.
Keywords
diffusion model, Parkinson’s disease, ADI method, image segmentation