SPECT imaging of high energy isotopes and isotopes with high energy contaminants with rotating slat collimators.
OBJECTIVE
Quantitative SPECT imaging is limited by many factors, including penetration of high energy photons through the collimator. Even small peaks of high energy yield extensive contamination in the photopeak energy window. Rotating slat collimators typically offer a 40- to 50-fold increase in geometric detection efficiency compared to parallel hole collimators, while the amount of high-energy contamination is expected to remain the same. The aim of this study is to show that SPECT for isotopes with high energy peaks benefits from the use of a rotating slat collimator by significantly reducing the effect of high energy contamination.


METHODS
Monte Carlo simulations were performed for I-123 and I-131. The simulation of a single point source in a scattering medium was used to investigate the history of each detected photon both for the rotating slat and the parallel hole collimator. Next, realistic simulations of an image quality phantom in combination with iterative image reconstruction enabled us to study the gain in image quality which can be expected for the rotating slat collimator.


RESULTS
The results show that the rotating slat collimator is able to reduce the contribution of high energy photons from about 60% to about 8% of all the detected photons in the photopeak energy window. This results in a recovered contrast gain of about 25%. For I-131, there was a reduction in contamination from 65% to 49% when using a rotating slat instead of a parallel hole collimator. This resulted in an average hot contrast improvement of 12% and average cold contrast improvement of 8% for tomographic images.


CONCLUSIONS
Rotating slat collimators have an additional advantage regarding image quality for isotopes with high energy emissions, especially if the contamination arises from photons with energies higher than the main emission energy, due to the relatively lower number of measured collimator-penetrating photons with respect to geometrically collimated photons.
Van Holen
Roel
R
Department of ELIS, MEDISIP, Ghent University, IBBT, IBiTech, De Pintelaan 185 Block B, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium. roel.vanholen@ugent.be
Staelens
Steven
S
Vandenberghe
Stefaan
S
D016477:Artifacts; D003198:Computer Simulation; D007457:Iodine Radioisotopes; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D017785:Photons; D011336:Probability; D012399:Rotation; D012542:Scattering, Radiation; D015899:Tomography, Emission-Computed, Single-Photon / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods
D007457:Iodine Radioisotopes