Multi-pinhole cardiac SPECT performance with hemi-Ellipsoid detectors for two geometries

SPECT is primarily used in the clinic for noninvasive cardiac myocardial perfusion imaging. However, sensitivity is impaired due to the need for collimation in SPECT. New second generation systems including those with multi-pinhole collimation has shown high sensitive acquisitions. This has enabled faster or lower dose “stress-first” acquisitions, but not both. Here a third generation dedicated Cardiac SPECT system is proposed which yields higher sensitivity by a factor of ∼3.1 compared to second generation systems (and more than order of magnitude over Generation I systems), by using hemi-Ellipsoid shaped detectors with pinhole collimation. This may ultimately enable ultra-low-dose imaging (∼3mCi) in less than 4 min.