Cardiac SPECT restoration using MR-based support constraints

Cardiac SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) is an important tool for evaluating heart disease in terms of diagnosis and treatment, especially for determining myocardial perfusion and thus the degree of myocardial injury. The distortion of left ventricular (LV) geometry can cause errors in defect size determination from SPECT perfusion images due to partial volume effects. Constrained iterative restoration, using an anatomic constraint from a registered magnetic resonance (MR) image of the heart, can be used to correct these errors and thus improve the interpretation and measurement of cardiac perfusion images.