Nuclear medicine imaging principles from MathCAD tutorials

Learning Objectives To understand the value of user-controlled computer-based imaging tutorials in nuclear medicine technology education.

Summary: Nuclear medicine imaging physics involves many mathematically sophisticated concepts that are often difficult for technologist students to learn and apply. These concepts include projection imaging, sinograms, tomographic reconstruction and digital filtering. Generally, these students have neither the background nor the time to master the mathematical formalisms. Nevertheless, they are required to learn how to select acquisition and processing parameters to produce optimal images and how to interpret the results of imaging procedures. I have developed a set of computer tutorials for technologist students to explore nuclear medicine imaging principles without mathematical details. These tutorials use MathCAD® (PTC), a commercial math program, to do the calculations and display the resulting image data. These tutorials have been used at BCIT for many years. Some were presented at the 1999 SNM Annual Meeting, but have been extensively revised and new tutorials have been developed. The tutorials cover topics such as image quality characteristics (spatial resolution, contrast, noise, partial volume averaging), quality control (detector uniformity, phantoms, SPECT) and concepts foundational to tomography (projection, backprojection, fourier transforms, spatial frequency, filtering). The user controls the image characteristics (matrix size, activity distribution, count density, blurring) and processing parameters (smoothing, filtering, reconstruction). Students gain relevant physical intuition by relating how changing the parameters impacts the resulting image data.