Attenuation Corrected Cardiac SPECT Imaging Using Simultaneous Reconstruction and a Priori Information

Attenuation correction in SPECT typically performed using CT or Gadolinium-source based transmission scans, is more and more becoming established practice in many medical applications. For cases where no further anatomical information from a transmission scan is available, different approaches have been proposed in the past, attempting to recover the attenuation information directly from SPECT projection data. However, these methods often result in noticeable image artifacts caused by an inherent cross-dependency between the estimated attenuation and activity distribution.