Cardiac Phantom for Improved Small-Animal SPECT Myocardial Blood Flow Quantification

摘要

To assess myocardial blood flow (MBF) in mice, and subsequently coronary microvascular function, we have previously developed a non-invasive, in-vivo, dynamic cardiac imaging protocol using the U-SPECT+ system. This work investigates microSPECT quantitative capabilities of cardiac imaging by utilizing a multi-part cardiac phantom and applying a known kinetic model to static data, allowing for assessment of kinetic modeling accuracy. The phantom was designed with four main components: two left-ventricular myocardium sections and two left-ventricular blood pool sections, sized for end-systole and end-diastole. Each section of the phantom was imaged separately while acquiring list-mode data. A Gaussian-based kinetic model was developed and applied to list-mode data to estimate both the myocardium and blood pool activity concentrations over time. The generated dynamic list-mode data were then combined, such that the myocardium and blood pool segments are contained in a single image, and reconstructed. Regions of interest were drawn in the resulting images, and kinetic modeling parameter estimation was performed. Given an input K