New principles in nuclear medicine imaging: A full aperture stereoscopic imaging technique

In nuclear medicine, images of planar scintigraphy and single photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) obtained through gamma camera (GC) appear to be blurred. Alternatively, coded aperture imaging (CAI) can surpass the quality of GC images, but still it is not extensively used due to the decoding complexity of some images and the difficulty in controlling the noise. Summing up, the images obtained through GC are low quality and it is still difficult to implement CAI technique. Here we present a full aperture imaging (FAI) technique which overcomes the problems of CAI ordinary systems. The gamma radiation transmitted through a large single aperture is edge-encoded, taking advantage of the fact that nuclear radiation is spatially incoherent. The novel technique is tested by means of Monte Carlo method with simple and complex sources. Spatial resolution tests and parallax tests of GC versus FAI were made, and three-dimensional capacities of GC versus FAI were analyzed. Simulations have allowed comparison of both techniques under ideal, identical conditions. The results show that FAI technique has greater sensitivity (~100 times) and greater spatial resolution (>2.6 times at 40 cm source-detector distance) than that of GC. FAI technique allows to obtain images with typical resolution of GC short source-detector distance but at longer source-detector distance. The FAI decoding algorithm simultaneously reconstructs four different projections, while GC produces only one projection per acquisition. Our results show it is possible to apply an extremely simple encoded imaging technique, and get three-dimensional radioactivity information. Thus GC-based systems could be substituted, given that FAI technique is simple and it produces four images which may feed stereoscopic systems, substituting in some cases, tomographic reconstructions.