Effects of photon attenuation on the determination of cardiac volumes from reconstructed counts in gated blood pool SPET.

In gated cardiac blood pool single-photon emission tomography (SPET), the volume of a ventricle may be determined by a method that exploits the proportionality between that volume and the total reconstructed counts within a larger volume of interest that includes the actual ventricle. The present work was carried out to determine how the attenuation of photons modifies the reconstructed counts obtained with this technique, and how this affects the accuracy of volume determination. Furthermore, we wanted to investigate how count-based determination of ventricle volumes is affected by the total SPET rotation angle and by different arm positions. We used micro -maps derived from computed tomography (CT) series of nine arbitrarily chosen patients to calculate a volume correction factor for each cardiac volume manually drawn on the CT images. An anthropomorphic chest phantom was used to confirm the calculation of correction factors. For the regions of the ventricles contained within a CT slice through the central part of the heart, the left to right volume ratio needed to be corrected by factors of 1.21 and 1.12 for 180 degrees and 360 degrees rotation, respectively. When all voxels within the left and right ventricles were included, the required volume ratio correction factor was close to 1. However, the variation among patients was larger for a 180 degrees (range 0.97-1.08) than for a 360 degrees rotation arc (range 1.0-1.03).