Can partial volume effects be used to measure myocardial thickness and thickening?

It has been hypothesized that myocardial thickness and thickening can be measured from gated positron emission tomography (PET) or single-photon-emission computed tomography (SPECT) studies by observing the partial volume related intensity changes in the myocardium that occur from end-diastole to end-systole. The authors make a preliminary assessment of whether this hypothesis is valid. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data to simulate PET images, it has been found that serious errors may occur with some implementations of these count-based methods for measuring thickness and thickening, due to the nonlinearity of the partial volume effects. A model-based method is presented which overcomes some of these limitations, but which is subject to limitations in the presence of statistical noise.<
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