title: Reconstruction of dynamic gated cardiac SPECT.
abstract: In this paper we propose an image reconstruction procedure which aims to unify gated single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and dynamic SPECT into a single method. We divide the cardiac cycle into a number of gate intervals as in gated SPECT, but treat the tracer distribution for each gate as a time-varying signal. By using both dynamic and motion-compensated temporal regularization, our reconstruction procedure will produce an image sequence that shows both cardiac motion and time-varying tracer distribution simultaneously. To demonstrate the proposed reconstruction method, we simulated gated cardiac perfusion imaging using the gated mathematical cardiac-torso (gMCAT) phantom with Tc99m-Teboroxime as the imaging agent. Our results show that the proposed method can produce more accurate reconstruction of gated dynamic images than independent reconstruction of individual gate frames with spatial smoothness alone. In particular, our results show that the former could improve the contrast to noise ratio of a simulated perfusion defect by as much as 100% when compared to the latter.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, 3301 South Dearborn Street, Chicago, Illinois 60616, USA.
authors.forename: Mingwu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Jin
authors.forename: Yongyi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Michael A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: King
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D015637:Gated Blood-Pool Imaging / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D006321:Heart / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D015899:Tomography, Emission-Computed, Single-Photon / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*