vPET-ABC: Fast Voxelwise Approximate Bayesian Inference for Kinetic Modeling in PET

TL;DR

vPET-ABC is a fast, GPU-accelerated, likelihood-free Bayesian inference method for voxelwise kinetic modeling in total-body PET, enabling uncertainty quantification and model selection without retraining.

Contribution

It introduces a likelihood-free, vectorized Bayesian inference framework for PET kinetic modeling that scales efficiently to total-body data and is model-agnostic.

Findings

Produced posterior summaries close to Monte Carlo baselines.

Achieved more accurate mean estimates than NNLS.

Enabled high-quality, fast whole-volume parametric imaging.

Abstract

Dynamic PET kinetic modeling increasingly demands voxelwise uncertainty quantification and robust model selection. Yet total-body PET (TB-PET) data volumes make conventional Bayesian approaches, such as per-voxel MCMC, computationally impractical, while deep models typically require retraining and careful revalidation when tracers, protocols, or kinetic models change, without necessarily improving inference speed. Vectorized voxelwise approximate Bayesian computation (vPET-ABC) is introduced as a likelihood-free, model-agnostic posterior inference framework for dynamic PET kinetic modeling at total-body scale. The method replaces explicit likelihood evaluation with forward simulations and a discrepancy test, then exploits full vectorization to transform voxelwise inference into an embarrassingly parallel workload suited to modern GPUs. In simulation, vPET-ABC produced posterior summaries with small divergence from sequential Monte Carlo baselines, and posterior mean estimates significantly more accurate than non-negative least squares (NNLS). For model selection between the linear parametric neurotransmitter model (lp-ntPET) and the multilinear reference tissue model, vPET-ABC maintained high sensitivity under high noise with moderate loss of specificity, whereas NNLS+Bayesian information criteria exhibited the opposite trade-off with near-zero sensitivity. In a human cigarette smoking dataset, vPET-ABC yielded denser probabilistic activation maps than lp-ntPET with effective number of parameters. On a 50 min total-body [18F]FDG study, vPET-ABC generated high quality whole volume K_i parametric images within practical runtimes on a single GPU, while also preserved local spatial correlation better than NNLS. Overall, vPET-ABC delivers fast, training-free, uncertainty-aware inference that scales to TB-PET and remains portable across tracers and kinetic models.