Direct reconstruction of parametric images from cardiac gated dynamic spect data

In this work, we propose a direct reconstruction approach to determine a sequence of kinetic parametric images from a single gated acquisition, of which the goal is to provide information simultaneously for both tracer kinetics and cardiac wall motion. The parameter images of the different gates are determined jointly using maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation from all the available image data in order to exploit the similarity among the different gates. The proposed approach is demonstrated in the context of single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), where the challenge is great due to the under-determined nature of the problem and increased imaging noise. Our results show that use of gated temporal smoothing could effectively improve the reconstruction accuracy of kinetic parameters.