[Three Dimensional Display in Nuclear Medicine].

Imaging techniques to obtain a tomographic image in nuclear medicine such as PET and SPECT are widely used. It is necessary to interpreting all of the tomographic images obtained in order to accurately evaluate the individual lesion, whereas three dimensional display is often useful in order to overview and evaluate the feature of the entire lesion or disease such as the position, size and abnormal pattern. In Japan, the use of three dimensional image analysis workstation with an application of the co-registration and image fusion between the functional images such as PET or SPECT and anatomical images such as CT or MRI has been generalized. In addition, multimodality imaging system such as a PET/CT and SPECT/CT has been widespread. Therefore, it is expected to improve the diagnostic accuracy using three dimensionally image fusion to functional images with poor anatomical information. In this commentary, as an example of a three dimensional display that are commonly used in nuclear medicine examination in Japan, brain regions, cardiac region and bone and tumor region will be introduced separately.