Background: When the simultaneous transmission computed tomography (TCT)/single photon emission CT (SPECT) acquisition protocol is applied to myocardial studies using a 3-detector SPECT, the narrow effective field of view of a fan beam collimator used for TCT acquisition may cause truncation artifacts on TCT images. In this paper, we propose a new method of correcting for the truncation of TCT.
Methods: The truncated parts of the TCT projection data are corrected using quadratic functions, based on the properties that the integral of non-truncated TCT projection data is constant at any projection angle and the position of the centre of gravity is focused on a fixed point. The usefulness of our method was investigated in phantom and human studies using a 3-detector SPECT equipped with one cardiac fan beam collimator for TCT and two parallel beam collimators for SPECT. We used Tl as a tracer for SPECT and Tc as an external source for TCT.
Results: The phantom and human studies showed that our method can adequately correct for the truncation of TCT data acquired using a fan beam collimator in a 3-detector SPECT, as long as there is no truncation in SPECT data.
Conclusion: Our method appears to be useful for improving the SPECT images obtained using simultaneous TCT/SPECT acquisition in a 3-detector SPECT. However, further studies will be necessary to establish the clinical usefulness of this method.