Quantification of myocardial uptake rate constants in dynamic small-animal SPECT using a cardiac phantom.

Quantification of myocardial uptake rate constants in dynamic small-animal SPECT using a cardiac phantom.
Phys Med Biol. 2019 Feb 05;:
Authors: Johnson LC, Guerraty MA, Moore SC, Metzler SD
Abstract
Myocardial blood flow and myocardial blood flow reserve (MBFR) measurements are often used clinically to quantify coronary microvascular function. Developing imaging-based methods to measure MBFR for research in mice would be advantageous for evaluating new treatment methods for coronary microvascular disease, yet this is more challenging in mice than in humans. This work investigates microSPECT's quantitative capabilities of cardiac imaging by utilizing a multi-part cardiac phantom and applying a known kinetic model to synthesize kinetic data from static data, allowing for assessment of kinetic modeling accuracy. The phantom was designed with four main components: two left-ventricular (LV) myocardial sections and two LV blood-pool sections, sized for end-systole and end-diastole. Each section of the phantom was imaged separately while acquiring list-mode data. These static, separate-compartment data were manipulated into synthetic dynamic data using a kinetic model representing the myocardium and blood-pool activity concentrations over time and then combined into a set of dynamic image frames and reconstructed. Regions of interest were drawn on the resulting images, and kinetic parameters were estimated. This process was performed for th...

Source: Physics in Medicine and Biology - February 5, 2019 Category: Physics Authors: Johnson LC, Guerraty MA, Moore SC, Metzler SD Tags: Phys Med Biol Source Type: research