Detectability of perfusion defect in gated dynamic cardiac SPECT images

Recently we developed an image reconstruction procedure aimed to unify gated imaging and dynamic imaging in nuclear cardiac imaging. It can yield a single image sequence to show simultaneously both cardiac motion and tracer distribution change over the course of imaging. In this work, we further develop and investigate the feasibility of our gated dynamic imaging procedure for perfusion defect detection in cardiac SPECT imaging, where the challenge is even greater without using fast camera rotations. We study the saliency of temporal kinetic information derived from the reconstructed dynamic images for differentiating defects from normal cardiac perfusion. We also propose several metrics to characterize the salient kinetic information in gated dynamic images. The proposed development was demonstrated using simulated gated cardiac imaging with the NCAT phantom and Tc^99m-Teboroxime as the imaging agent.