Influence of the Depth Effect on Quantitative Results in Single Photon Emission Tomography with Attenuation Correction

A study has been carried out in order to assess the influence of the solid angle effect during the scintigraphic images acquisition (depth effect), on the transverse sections reconstructed with 9 different techniques of attenuation correction. A numerical phantom of the abdomen, generated with auto-attenuation and with or without depth effect has been used. This depth effect was simulated from experimental data. The results show that the depth effect, modifying the reconstruction results has to be taken into account for the evaluation of attenuation correction techniques.