title: C-SPECT - a Clinical Cardiac SPECT/Tct Platform: Design Concepts and Performance Potential.
abstract: Because of scarcity of photons emitted from the heart, clinical cardiac SPECT imaging is mainly limited by photon statistics. The sub-optimal detection efficiency of current SPECT systems not only limits the quality of clinical cardiac SPECT imaging but also makes more advanced potential applications difficult to be realized. We propose a high-performance system platform - C-SPECT, which has its sampling geometry optimized for detection of emitted photons in quality and quantity. The C-SPECT has a stationary C-shaped gantry that surrounds the left-front side of a patient's thorax. The stationary C-shaped collimator and detector systems in the gantry provide effective and efficient detection and sampling of photon emission. For cardiac imaging, the C-SPECT platform could achieve 2 to 4 times the system geometric efficiency of conventional SPECT systems at the same sampling resolution. This platform also includes an integrated transmission CT for attenuation correction. The ability of C-SPECT systems to perform sequential high-quality emission and transmission imaging could bring cost-effective high-performance to clinical imaging. In addition, a C-SPECT system could provide high detection efficiency to accommodate fast acquisition rate for gated and dynamic cardiac imaging. This paper describes the design concepts and performance potential of C-SPECT, and illustrates how these concepts can be implemented in a basic system.
authors.affiliation: Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, IL 60612, USA.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.forename: Caesar E
authors.initials: CE
authors.lastname: Ordonez
authors.forename: Haoning
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.forename: Yusheng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Jingai
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
keywords: Cardiovascular system; SPECT; imaging; instrumentation; system analysis and design