Quantitative reconstruction for myocardial perfusion SPECT: an efficient approach by depth-dependent deconvolution and matrix rotation

An efficient reconstruction method for myocardial perfusion single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) has been developed which compensates simultaneously for attenuation, scatter, and resolution variation. The scattered photons in the primary-energy-window measurements are approximately removed by subtracting the weighted scatter-energy-window samples. The resolution variation is corrected by deconvolving the subtracted data with the detector-response kernel in frequency space using the depth-dependent frequency relation. The attenuated photons are compensated by recursively tracing the attenuation factors through the object-specific attenuation map. An experimental chest phantom with defects inside myocardium was used to test the method. The attenuation map of the phantom was reconstructed from transmission scans using a flat external source and a high-resolution parallel-hole collimator of a single-detector system. The detector-response kernel was approximated from measurements of a point source in air at several depths from the collimator surface. The emission data were acquired by the same detector setting. A computer simulation using similar protocols as in the experiment was performed. Both the simulation and experiment showed significant improvement in quantification with the proposed method, as compared to the conventional filtered-backprojection technique. The quantitative gain by the additional deconvolution was demonstrated. The computation time was less than 20 min on a HP/730 desktop computer for reconstruction of a 1282 x 64 array from 128 projections of 128 x 64 samples.