New Software Solutions for Cardiac SPECT Imaging

Recent advances in myocardial perfusion single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) processing software, incorporating iterative reconstruction, resolution recovery, and noise compensation, now provide the ability to acquire high quality scans despite reduced administered activity, shortened acquisition time, or both. These methods have thereby provided imaging protocol flexibility and facilitated patient-centered imaging. Other software methods allow for improved image quality by prescribing an image acquisition time that will yield optimal SPECT image count density. On some new solid state cameras list mode acquisition is now available, whereby suboptimal acquisition stops such as those with patient motion can be eliminated prior to SPECT reconstruction. Still other methods, incorporating phase analysis of gated perfusion SPECT, provide a quantitative analysis of left ventricular dyssynchrony, aiding in the selection of patients for whom cardiac resynchronization therapy is most beneficial.