Abstract
In gated cardiac blood pool single-photon emission tomography (SPET), the volume of a ventricle may be determined by a method that exploits the proportionality between that volume and the total reconstructed counts within a larger volume of interest that includes the actual ventricle. The present work was carried out to determine how the attenuation of photons modifies the reconstructed counts obtained with this technique, and how this affects the accuracy of volume determination. Furthermore, we wanted to investigate how count-based determination of ventricle volumes is affected by the total SPET rotation angle and by different arm positions. We used µ-maps derived from computed tomography (CT) series of nine arbitrarily chosen patients to calculate a volume correction factor for each cardiac volume manually drawn on the CT images. An anthropomorphic chest phantom was used to confirm the calculation of correction factors. For the regions of the ventricles contained within a CT slice through the central part of the heart, the left to right volume ratio needed to be corrected by factors of 1.21 and 1.12 for 180° and 360° rotation, respectively. When all voxels within the left and right ventricles were included, the required volume ratio correction factor was close to 1. However, the variation among patients was larger for a 180° (range 0.97–1.08) than for a 360° rotation arc (range 1.0–1.03).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Germano G, Van Krieginge SV, Berman DS. Quantitative gated blood pool SPECT. In: Germano G, Berman DS, eds. Clinical gated cardiac SPECT. New York: Futura; 1999:339–347.
Pretorius PH, Xia W, King MA, Tsui BMW, Pan T-SP, Villegas BJ. Evaluation of right and left ventricular volumes and ejection fractions using a mathematical cardiac torso phantom. J Nucl Med 1997; 38:1528–1535.
Barlett ML, Srinivasan G, Barker WC, et al. Left ventricular ejection fraction: comparison of results from planar and SPECT gated blood pool studies. J Nucl Med 1996; 37:1795–1799.
Eisner RL, Nowak DJ, Pettigrew R, Fajman W. Fundamentals of 180° acquisition and reconstruction in SPECT imaging. J Nucl Med 1986; 27:1717–1728.
Maublant JC, Peycelon P, Kwiatkowski F, Lusson J-R, Standke RH, Veyre A. Comparaison between 180° and 360° data collection in technetium-99m MIBI SPECT of the myocardium. J Nucl Med 1989; 30:295–300.
MacIntyre WJ, Go RT, Houser TS, et al. Evaluation of 180° and 360° reconstruction of the heart by transaxial tomography with thallium-201. In: Digital imaging: clinical advances in nuclear medicine. New York: Society of Nuclear Medicine; 1982:197–203.
Battista JJ, Rider WD, van Dyk J. Computed tomography for radiotherapy planning. Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys 1980; 6:99–107.
Schneider U, Pedroni E, Lomax A. The calibration of CT Hounsfield units for radiotherapy treatment planning. Phys Med Biol 1996; 41:111–124.
Msaki P, Axelsson B, Dahl M, Larsson S. Generalized scatter correction method in SPECT using point scatter distribution functions. J Nucl Med 1987; 28:1861–1869.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Seierstad, T., Bogsrud, T. & Skretting, A. Effects of photon attenuation on the determination of cardiac volumes from reconstructed counts in gated blood pool SPET. Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging 31, 399–402 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-003-1335-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-003-1335-6