TY - JOUR T1 - Improved clinical and quantitative dynamic Rb-82 cardiac imaging with resolution modeling JF - Journal of Nuclear Medicine JO - J Nucl Med SP - 62P LP - 62P VL - 49 IS - supplement 1 AU - Arman Rahmim AU - Jing Tang AU - Martin Lodge AU - Sahel Lashkari AU - Mohammad Ay AU - Riika Lautamaki AU - Benjamin Tsui AU - Frank Bengel Y1 - 2008/05/01 UR - http://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/49/supplement_1/62P.1.abstract N2 - 246 Objectives: To investigate, in the context of Rb-82 cardiac PET imaging, improvements in image quality obtained via a novel resolution modeling approach. Methods: An accurate resolution modeling approach was developed in which resolution degrading factors were modeled within reconstruction. A combined simSET/GATE Monte-Carlo tool was used to simulate Rb-82 cardiac acquisition. Time activity curves of myocardium, blood pool and other organs were measured from five healthy patients, and spline-smoothed to simulate the input activities. Multiple noise realizations within clinical (90sec delay, 5min) and quantitative dynamic (30sec delay, 10x12sec) imaging were simulated. For the former, defects were also simulated, and defect contrast vs. noise plots were assessed. For the latter, we performed compartmental analyses on the reconstructed image sequences, and the bias vs. variance for the K1 values were compared. Results: The reconstructed resolution was seen to improve from 5.1mm-7.7mm across the FoV to ~3.5mm nearly uniformly across the FoV. Hot and cold sphere contrast vs. noise trade-off curves were seen to substantially improve. Defect contrast vs. noise was significantly improved (75% to 63%, matched noise, true contrast 50%). For the dynamic sequence considered, with increasing post-smoothing, the results indicated increasing bias and decreasing variance in the compartmental extracted K1 values, and the trade-off curve was substantially improved with resolution modeling. Conclusions: Accurate resolution modeled reconstruction can significantly improve image quality in clinical and quantitative dynamic Rb-82 cardiac PET imaging. ER -