Investigations into possible causes of hot inferior wall artifacts in attenuation corrected cardiac perfusion images

Author

Luo, Der-shan ; King, Michael A. ; Morgan, Hugh T. ; Pan, Tin-Su ; Xia, Weishi ; Pretorius, P. Hennie ; Case, James A.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Nucl. Med., Massachusetts Univ. Med. Center, Worcester, MA, USA

Volume

44

Issue

3

fYear

1997

fDate

6/1/1997 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

1146

Lastpage

1153

Abstract

Through our investigations with simulated images, we have identified several causes of hot inferior wall artifacts in attenuation corrected SPECT cardiac perfusion images. With an insufficient number of iterations, the non-uniform resolution recovered in three dimensions and slow convergence rate of ML-EM reconstruction can cause this artifact when the heart is at a shallow angle (the axis of the heart is close to being horizontal) or when there exists significant background activity. Increasing the number of iterations does not correct this artifact when the attenuation map used has poor resolution or its attenuation coefficients used are not accurate. We also notice that the hot inferior wall artifact is more pronounced when body contouring acquisition or 180° angular sampling is used

Keywords

cardiology; convergence of numerical methods; image reconstruction; image resolution; iterative methods; maximum likelihood estimation; medical image processing; single photon emission computed tomography; 180° angular sampling; ML-EM reconstruction; SPECT; attenuation coefficients; attenuation corrected cardiac perfusion images; attenuation map; background activity; body contouring acquisition; hot inferior wall artifact; hot inferior wall artifacts; iterations; nonuniform resolution; resolution; shallow angle; simulated images; slow convergence rate; three dimensions; Attenuation; Biomedical imaging; Blood; Ellipsoids; Heart; Image reconstruction; Imaging phantoms; Lungs; Medical simulation; Nuclear medicine;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9499

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/23.596979

Filename

596979