Two-dimensional mapping of three-dimensional SPECT data: a preliminary step to the quantitation of thallium myocardial perfusion single photon emission tomography.

A method is presented by which tomographic myocardial perfusion data are prepared for quantitative analysis. The method is characterized by an interrogation of the original data, which results in a size and shape normalization. The method is analogous to the circumferential profile methods used in planar scintigraphy but requires a polar-to-cartesian transformation from three to two dimensions. As was the case in the planar situation, centering and reorientation are explicit. The degree of data reduction is evaluated by reconstructing "idealized" three-dimensional data from the two-dimensional sampling vectors. The method differs from previously described approaches by the absence in the resulting vector of a coordinate reflecting cartesian coordinate in the original data (slice number).