Preliminary evaluation of the effect of an attenuation correction method in myocardial perfusion SPECT

We propose a method to assess an attenuation correction method in myocardial perfusion SPECT. Three types of images are obtained: one resulting from a classic acquisition and filtered back-projection (classic), and those resulting from acquisition with a transmission source and an iterative reconstruction, with (music) or without (hybrid) the attenuation correction factored in to compare the three types of images and classify them as normal or abnormal, a three dimensional inter-patient quantitative comparison method was used. Differences were computed as fractions of the myocardial volume in which density differences are significant by population standards. In 7 cases the cumulative difference between prone and supine in hybrid images was 124 and 45 in music images. In 10 cases the cumulative difference between classic vs music images was 279, and between classic and hybrid 86. The AC changed 4/12 cases from abnormal to normal. The attenuation correction effect was concentrated on the septal and inferior walls, but neither exclusively nor evenly among patients. The attenuation correction effectively minimizes attenuation effects by a factor of 2.7, due to a correction of at least 69%. The correction has a small but substantial effect on the results.