FOUR-DIMENSIONAL RECONSTRUCTION OF GATED CARDIAC SPECT WITH ATTENUATION AND SCATTER COMPENSATION

In our recent work we proposed a motion-compensated approach for four-dimensional (4D) reconstruction of gated cardiac images in single photon emission tomography (SPECT), and demonstrated that motion-compensated temporal smoothing can be effective for noise reduction in the reconstructed images. In this paper we further develop our proposed 4D approach by considering attenuation and scattering which are two important degradation factors in SPECT imaging. Our simulation results demonstrate that with proper attenuation and scatter compensation, the 4D method can lead to improved reconstruction over independent reconstruction with spatial smoothing only. Our evaluation study was conducted by simulating Tc^99m labeled sestamibi imaging based on the NURBS-based cardiac-torso (NCAT) phantom