Solid state Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CZT) gamma cameras for SPECT imaging offer significantly improved energy resolution compared to traditional scintillation detectors. However, the photopeak resolution is often asymmetric due to incomplete charge collection within the detector, resulting in many photopeak events incorrectly sorted into lower energy bins (“tailing”). These misplaced events contaminate the true scatter signal, which may negatively impact scatter correction methods that rely on estimates of scatter from the spectra. Additionally, because CZT detectors are organized into arrays, each individual detector element may exhibit different degrees of tailing. Here, we present a modified dualenergy window scatter correction method for emission detection and imaging that attempts to account for positiondependent effects of incomplete charge collection in the CZT gamma camera of our dedicated breast SPECT-CT system. Point source measurements and geometric phantoms were used to estimate the impact of tailing on the scatter signal and extract a better estimate of the ratio of scatter within two energy windows. To evaluate the method, cylindrical phantoms with and without a separate fillable chamber were scanned to determine the impact on quantification in hot, cold, and uniform background regions. Projections were reconstructed using OSEM, and the results for the traditional and modified scatter correction methods were compared. Results show that while modest reduced quantification accuracy was observed in hot and cold regions of the multi-chamber phantoms, the modified scatter correction method yields up to 8% improved quantification accuracy with 4% less added noise than the traditional DEW method within uniform background regions.

Date Published: 20 March 2015
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 9413, Medical Imaging 2015: Image Processing, 94132X (20 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2082195

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9413:
Medical Imaging 2015: Image Processing
Sébastien Ourselin; Martin A. Styner, Editor(s)