RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 “Motion-Frozen” Display and Quantification of Myocardial Perfusion
JF Journal of Nuclear Medicine
JO J Nucl Med
FD Society of Nuclear Medicine
SP 1128
OP 1134
VO 45
IS 7
A1 Piotr J. Slomka
A1 Hidetaka Nishina
A1 Daniel S. Berman
A1 Xingping Kang
A1 Cigdem Akincioglu
A1 John D. Friedman
A1 Sean W. Hayes
A1 Usaf E. Aladl
A1 Guido Germano
YR 2004
UL http://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/45/7/1128.abstract
AB Gated myocadial perfusion SPECT (MPS) incorporates functional and perfusion information of the left ventricle (LV). To improve the image quality and accuracy of gated MPS we propose to eliminate the influence of cardiac LV motion in the display and quantification by a novel “motion-frozen” (MF) technique. Methods: Three-dimensional LV contours were identified on images of the individual time phases. Three-dimensional phase-to-phase motion vectors were derived by sampling of the epi- and endocardial surfaces. A nonlinear image warping (thin-plate spline) was applied to warp all image phases to fit the end-diastolic (ED) phase. Warped images were created to provide the LV image in the ED phase but containing counts from an arbitrary number of time intervals. MF quantification has been performed using the same phase-to-phase motion vectors. MF normal perfusion limits were created from 99mTc sestamibi gated MPS studies of 40 females and 40 males with low likelihood (<5%) of coronary artery disease. All MF processing was completely automated. In the initial evaluation, we assessed the display quality and quantification of stress images using MF processing in 51 consecutive patients with 16-frame electrocardiographic gating and available coronary angiography. Results: The display quality was significantly better for MF images as assessed visually. The MF images had the appearance of ED frames but were less noisy and of higher resolution than the summed images. MF images had higher maximum count values in the LV (116% ± 6%) and higher contrast (12.5 ± 7.7 vs. 9.5 ± 3.2) than the corresponding summed images. The area under the receiver operator characteristic curve for prediction of stenoses ≥ 70% by the MF method was 0.92 ± 0.04 versus 0.89 ± 0.04 by standard quantification (P = not significant). The computation time for automated MF quantification and warping was <25 s for each case. Conclusion: We have developed a novel technique for display and quantification of gated myocardial perfusion images, which retrospectively eliminates blur due to cardiac motion. Such processing of gated MPS appears to improve the effective resolution of images. Initial evaluation indicates that it may improve the accuracy of gated MPS in detection of coronary artery disease.