Evaluation of the effects of patient arm attenuation in SPECT cardiac perfusion imaging

It was hypothesized that the use of attenuation correction could compensate for degradation in the uniformity of apparent localization of imaging agents seen in cardiac walls when patients are imaged with arms at their sides. Noise-free simulations of the digital MCAT phantom were employed to investigate this hypothesis. Four variations in camera size and collimation scheme were investigated. We observed that: 1) without attenuation correction, the arms had little additional influences on the uniformity of the heart for 180° reconstructions and caused a small increase in nonuniformity for 360° reconstructions, where the impact of both arms was included; 2) change in patient size had more of an impact on count uniformity than the presence of the arms, either with or without attenuation correction; 3) for a low number of iterations and large patient size, slightly better uniformity was obtained from parallel emission data than from fan-beam emission data, independent of whether parallel or fan-beam transmission data was used to reconstruct the attenuation maps; and 4) for all camera configurations, uniformity was improved with attenuation correction and, given sufficient number of iterations, it was compatible among different imaging geometry combinations. Thus, iterative algorithms can compensate for the additional attenuation imposed by larger patients or having the arms on the sides. When the arms are at the sides of the patient, however, a larger radius of rotation may be required, resulting in decreased spatial resolution