An optimization of reconstruction parameters and investigation into the impact of photon scatter in 67Ga SPECT

During ⁶⁷Ga citrate SPECT imaging, photon downscatter will occur from higher energy photons into lower energy acquisition windows thus possibly adversely affecting reconstructed image quality. With these additional scattered photons present in projection data, the effect of using more complex reconstruction strategies such as three-dimensional detector response compensation (3-D DRC) and attenuation correction (AC) is unclear. Using a combination of numerical channelized hotelling observers (CHO) and human localization receiver operating characteristics (LROC) studies it has been found that maximum lesion detectability occurs when projection data is reconstructed using two iterations of the rescaled block iterative (RBI) algorithm with both 3-D DRC and patient specific AC, followed by a postreconstruction low-pass 3-D Gaussian filtering with a FWHM of ≈1 cm. These parameters deviate from optimal reconstruction parameters for primary photon-only projection data which finds that maximum lesion detection occurs after 4 RBI iterations with the same 3-D DRC, AC, and postfiltering. As expected, it is also observed that decreased tumor detectability results when scattered photons are present in ⁶⁷Ga projection data compared to primary photon only reconstructions (reducing maximum A_L from 0.79 to 0.58). This decrease has been found to be statistically significant in both human LROC and numerical observer studies, suggesting the need for scatter compensation during ⁶⁷Ga citrate imaging.