Respiratory and cardiac motions can degrade myocardial perfusion SPECT (MPS) image quality and reduce defect detection and quantitative accuracy. In this study, we developed a dual-respiratory and cardiac gating system for a high resolution fully stationary cardiac SPECT scanner in order to improve the image quality and defect detection. Respiratory motion was monitored using a compressive sensor pillow connected to a dual respiratory-cardiac gating box, which sends cardiac triggers only during end-expiration phases to the single cardiac trigger input on the SPECT scanners. The listmode data were rebinned retrospectively into end-expiration frames for respiratory motion reduction or 8 cardiac gates only during end-expiration phases to compensate for both respiratory and cardiac motions. The proposed method was first validated on a motion phantom in the presence and absence of multiple perfusion defects, and then applied on 11 patient studies with and without perfusion defects. In the normal phantom studies, the end-expiration gated SPECT (EXG-SPECT) reduced respiratory motion blur and increased myocardium to blood pool contrast by 51.2% as compared to the ungated images. The proposed method also yielded an average of 11.2% increase in myocardium to defect contrast as compared to the ungated images in the phantom studies with perfusion defects. In the patient studies, EXG-SPECT significantly improved the myocardium to blood pool contrast (p<0.005) by 24% on average as compared to the ungated images, and led to improved perfusion uniformity across segments on polar maps for normal patients. For a patient with defect, EXG-SPECT improved the defect contrast and definition. The dual respiratory-cardiac gating further reduced the blurring effect, increased the myocardium to blood pool contrast significantly by 36% (p<0.05) compared to EXG SPECT, and further improved defect characteristics and visualization of fine structures at the expense of increased noise on the patient with defect. The results showed that the proposed methods can effectively reduce motion blur in the images caused by both respiratory and cardiac motions, which may lead to more accurate defect detection and quantifications. This approach can be easily adapted in routine clinical practice on currently available commercial systems.

Due to the limited spatial resolution, partial volume effect (PVE) has been a major degrading factor on quantitative accuracy in emission tomography systems. This study aims to investigate the performance of several anatomical-based partial volume correction (PVC) methods for a dedicated cardiac SPECT/CT system (GE Discovery NM/CT 570c) with focused field-of-view (FOV) over a clinically relevant range of high and low count levels for two different radiotracer distributions. These PVC methods include perturbation Geometry Transfer Matrix (pGTM), pGTM followed by multi-target correction (MTC), pGTM with known concentration in blood pool, the former followed by MTC and our newly proposed methods, which perform the MTC method iteratively, where the mean values in all regions are estimated and updated by the MTC-corrected images each time in the iterative process. The NCAT phantom was simulated for cardiovascular imaging with 99mTc-tetrofosmin, a myocardial perfusion agent, and 99mTc-red blood cell (RBC), a pure intravascular imaging agent. Images were acquired at six different count levels to investigate the performance of PVC methods in both high and low count levels for low-dose applications. We performed two large animal in vivo cardiac imaging experiments following injection of 99mTc-RBC for evaluation of intramyocardial blood volume (IMBV). The simulation results showed our proposed iterative methods provide superior performance than other existing PVC methods in terms of image quality, quantitative accuracy, and reproducibility (standard deviation), particularly for low-count data. The iterative approaches are robust for both 99mTc-tetrofosmin perfusion imaging and 99mTc-RBC imaging of IMBV and blood pool activity even at low count levels. The animal study results indicated the effectiveness of PVC to correct the overestimation of IMBV due to blood pool contamination. In conclusion, the iterative PVC methods can achieve more accurate quantification, particularly for low count cardiac SPECT studies, typically obtained from low-dose protocols, gated studies, and dynamic applications.

Their results demonstrate that using a large SM that incorporates a CT derived body contour in the reconstruction could improve quantitative accuracy within the FOV for clinical studies with high extracardiac activity.

Purpose: Partial volume correction (PVC) methods typically improve quantification at the expense of increased image noise and reduced reproducibility. In this study, the authors developed a novel voxel-based PVC method that incorporates anatomical knowledge to improve quantification while suppressing noise for cardiac SPECT/CT imaging. Methods: In the proposed method, the SPECT images were first reconstructed using anatomicalbased maximum a posteriori (AMAP) with Bowsher's prior to penalize noise while preserving boundaries. A sequential voxel-by-voxel PVC approach (Yang's method) was then applied on the AMAP reconstruction using a template response. This template response was obtained by forward projecting a template derived from a contrast-enhanced CT image, and then reconstructed using AMAP to model the partial volume effects (PVEs) introduced by both the system resolution and the smoothing applied during reconstruction. To evaluate the proposed noise suppressed PVC (NS-PVC), the authors first simulated two types of cardiac SPECT studies: a 99m Tc-tetrofosmin myocardial perfusion scan and a 99m Tc-labeled red blood cell (RBC) scan on a dedicated cardiac multiple pinhole SPECT/CT at both high and low count levels. The authors then applied the proposed method on a canine equilibrium blood pool study following injection with 99m Tc-RBCs at different count levels by rebinning the list-mode data into shorter acquisitions. The proposed method was compared to MLEM reconstruction without PVC, two conventional PVC methods, including Yang's method and multitarget correction (MTC) applied on the MLEM reconstruction, and AMAP reconstruction without PVC. Results: The results showed that the Yang's method improved quantification, however, yielded increased noise and reduced reproducibility in the regions with higher activity. MTC corrected for PVE on high count data with amplified noise, although yielded the worst performance among all the methods tested on low-count data. AMAP effectively suppressed noise and reduced the spill-in effect in the low activity regions. However it was unable to reduce the spill-out effect in high activity regions. NS-PVC yielded superior performance in terms of both quantitative assessment and visual image quality while improving reproducibility. Conclusions:The results suggest that NS-PVC may be a promising PVC algorithm for application in low-dose protocols, and in gated and dynamic cardiac studies with low counts. C 2016 American Association of Physicists in Medicine. [http://dx

A single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging system can be modeled by a linear operator H that maps from object space to detector pixels in image space. The singular vectors and singular-value spectra of H provide useful tools for assessing system performance. The number of voxels used to discretize object space and the number of collection angles and pixels used to measure image space make the matrix dimensions H large. As a result, H must be stored sparsely which renders several conventional singular value decomposition (SVD) methods impractical. We used an iterative power methods SVD algorithm (Lanczos) designed to operate on very large sparsely stored matrices to calculate the singular vectors and singular-value spectra for two small animal pinhole SPECT imaging systems: FastSPECT II and M3R. The FastSPECT II system consisted of two rings of eight scintillation cameras each. The resulting dimensions of H were 68921 voxels by 97344 detector pixels. The M3R system is a four camera system that was reconfigured to measure image space using a single scintillation camera. The resulting dimensions of H were 50864 voxels by 6241 detector pixels. In this paper we present results of the SVD of each system and discuss calculation of the measurement and null space for each system.