System Design and Performance Evaluation for Cardiac SPECT Imaging with Multi-pinhole Collimator

SPECT is one of the powerful tools for radionuclide cardiac imaging. However, the image quality of cardiac SPECT imaging usually is degraded by the poor sensitivity and spatial resolution of conventional SPECT parallel-hole collimator. Based on the two detectors from a clinical SPECT scanner, multi-pinhole collimator was designed, which was used to replace the conventional parallel-hole collimator, for the cardiac imaging with high performance. The system performance was evaluated with analytical calculation. The results show that the central sensitivity is 0.038%, the spatial resolution is 1 cm, and it is better than that of the conventional SPECT. The projection with myocardial phantom was simulated. The reconstruction image with high quality was obtained by using iterative reconstruction algorithm. All the results demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed design of the cardiac SPECT with multi-pinhole collimator.