Improved Performance of a Multipinhole SPECT for DAT Imaging by Increasing Number of Pinholes at the Expense of Increased Multiplexing

Single photon emission tomography imaging of dopamine transporters (DATs) in the brain is a widely utilized study to improve the diagnosis of Parkinsonian syndromes, where conventional (parallel-hole and fan-beam) collimators on dual-head scanners are commonly employed. We have designed a multipinhole (MPH) collimator to improve the performance of DAT imaging. The MPH collimator focuses on the striatum and hence offers a better tradeoff for sensitivity and spatial resolution than the conventional collimators within this clinically most relevant region for DAT imaging. Our original MPH design consisted of 9 pinholes with a background-to-striatal (Bkg/Str) projection multiplexing of 1% only. In this simulation study, we investigated whether further improvements in the performance of MPH imaging could be obtained by increasing the number of pinholes, hence by enhancing the sensitivity and sampling, despite the ambiguity in reconstructing images due to increased multiplexing. We performed analytic simulations of the MPH configurations with 9, 13, and 16 pinholes (aperture diameters: 4–6 mm) using a digital phantom modeling DAT imaging. Our quantitative analyses indicated that using 13 (Bkg/Str: 12%) and 16 (Bkg/Str: 22%) pinholes provided better performance than the original 9-pinhole configuration for the acquisition with two or four angular views, but a similar performance with 8 and 16 views.