Experimental studies of SPECT scintimammography with combined cone-beam and parallel-beam collimators

摘要

Conventional SPECT Tc-99m sestamibi scintimammography (STSM) has limited clinical utility due to fairly low radiopharmaceutical uptake in the breast tissue as compared to the heart and the liver. We investigated the use of a cone-beam collimator (CBC) to STSM. Each detector on a multi-headed gamma camera can be equipped with parallel-beam (PBC) or cone-beam collimators (CBC). PBC can provide truncation-free SPECT projection sets, while CBC offers increased sensitivity in a limited field-of-view (FOV). Combined PBC and CBC SPECT data acquisition may provide improved lesion contrast and overall better imaging performance within CBC FOV with significantly reduced truncation artifacts in the reconstructed images. In this paper we evaluate the combined CBC&PBC SPECT method using a limited number of confirmed breast cancer patients and female chest phantoms with simulated breast lesions. We envision the combined CBC&PBC SPECT as a useful clinical tool in scintimammography.