Digital restoration of indium-111 and iodine-123 SPECT images with optimized Metz filters.

A number of radiopharmaceuticals of great current clinical interest for imaging are labeled with radionuclides that emit medium- to high-energy photons either as their primary radiation, or in low abundance in addition to their primary radiation. The imaging characteristics of these radionuclides result in gamma camera image quality that is inferior to that of 99mTc images. Thus, in this investigation 111In and 123I contaminated with approximately 4% 124I were chosen to test the hypothesis that a dramatic improvement in planar and SPECT images may be obtainable with digital image restoration. The count-dependent Metz filter is shown to be able to deconvolve the rapid drop at low spatial frequencies in the imaging system modulation transfer function (MTF) resulting from the acceptance of septal penetration and scatter in the camera window. Use of the Metz filter was found to result in improved spatial resolution as measured by both the full width at half maximum and full width at tenth maximum for both planar and SPECT studies. Two-dimensional, prereconstruction filtering with optimized Metz filters was also determined to improve image contrast, while decreasing the noise level for SPECT studies. A dramatic improvement in image quality was observed with the clinical application of this filter to SPECT imaging.