SPECT gated blood pool imaging-potentials and problems

In recent years, the use of single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) has been proposed for gated blood pool scans in order to assess left ventricular function. By constructing a beating heart phantom, the authors confined that SPECT may be superior to planar imaging for visual assessment of wall motion defects. Further, in data from five patients with coronary artery disease, a correlation was found between quantitative measures of heart wall defects from SPECT gated blood pool images and the magnitude of PET blood flow defects. Finally, the authors investigated the effects of statistical noise, background and attenuation on ejection fraction and amplitude calculations from SPECT slices. Statistical noise and background were found to produce very small effects while attenuation had a small but measurable effect on the amplitude map and no effect on ejection fraction.<
>