Body-Contour Acquisition Versus Circular Orbit Acquisition with Resolution Recovery in Cardiac SPECT

Two approaches are often applied to reduce the effects of depth-dependent resolution in SPECT. First is to use body-contour acquisition orbits and second is to apply resolution recovery (RR) in reconstruction. Unfortunately it is sometimes difficult to combine these methods, because in body-contour acquisitions especially many older gamma cameras do not record the object-to-detector distances, which are needed to perform RR in reconstruction. The objective of this study is to investigate if it would is better to use body-contour orbit without RR or circular orbit with RR in cardiac SPECT. The results of simulation and physical phantom studies showed that circular orbit with RR produce images with lower bias, higher contrast and better resolution than the body-contour orbit without RR. Therefore if object-to-detector distances are not available for body-contour orbits circular orbits with RR should be preferred in cardiac SPECT.