Evaluation of a pinhole collimator for I-131 SPECT head imaging

Author

Gilland, David R. ; Johnson, E. Lee ; Turkington, Timothy G. ; Coleman, R. Edward ; Jaszczak, Ronald J.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Radiol., Duke Univ. Med. Center, Durham, NC, USA

Volume

43

Issue

4

fYear

1996

fDate

8/1/1996 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

2230

Lastpage

2238

Abstract

The performance of a pinhole collimator for I-131 SPECT of the head was evaluated. The evaluation included planar and SPECT spatial resolution, sensitivity in air and in water, septal penetration, reconstructed image quality, and activity quantitation within a simple phantom that models tumor uptake in the head. The pinhole collimator was compared to medium and high energy parallel hole collimators. The pinhole collimator demonstrated improved resolution/sensitivity tradeoff compared with the parallel hole collimators over the range of distances relevant to head imaging. In planar point source images the pinhole collimator showed reduced penetration effects although in reconstructed images penetration effects were not apparent for either pinhole or high energy parallel hole collimators. Comparable activity quantitation accuracy was observed with all collimators. The accuracy was dependent on the segmentation threshold and calibration procedure. These results indicate that the pinhole collimator can provide improved performance conventional parallel hole collimators for I-131 imaging in the head

Keywords

biomedical equipment; single photon emission computed tomography; I; I-131 SPECT head imaging; SPECT spatial resolution; activity quantitation; activity quantitation accuracy; calibration procedure; head tumor uptake; high energy parallel hole collimators; medical diagnostic imaging; nuclear medicine; penetration effects; pinhole collimator; reconstructed image quality; segmentation threshold; septal penetration; Collimators; Energy resolution; Head; High-resolution imaging; Image quality; Image reconstruction; Image resolution; Imaging phantoms; Neoplasms; Spatial resolution;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9499

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/23.531887

Filename

531887