Evaluation of the effects of patient arm attenuation in cardiac perfusion imaging

This paper investigates the effects of having the patient's arms at their side on quantification of cardiac perfusion images. The authors observe that with the arms at the side, the reconstruction does look somewhat more blurred, due to the larger radius of rotation employed to accommodate the arms. However, the loss of uniformity is not greater than changing to imaging a bigger patient or performing a different acquisition scheme. In general, MLEM attenuation correction helps dramatically in maintaining uniformity of activity within the left ventricular walls.