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The design and development of a phantom for use in dynamic spect imaging

University of British Columbia

It has been suggested that the rate of tracer extraction from certain organs reflects the functional ability of that organ. The determination of the kinetic rates associated with extraction could therefore potentially provide a useful measure of organ function and could help in the diagnosis of disease. Dynamic SPECT is one imaging modality that attempts to determine these kinetic rates in three dimensions. A dynamic heart-in-thorax phantom has been developed for testing dynamic SPECT reconstruction methods. This phantom consists of a plastic myocardial volume containing smaller "defect" volumes, and a central blood pool. Surrounding the heart phantom is a larger thorax phantom which provides a non-uniform attenuating medium. The heart volumes are loaded with activity and washed out with water, thus producing the same type of activity decay that is seen to occur in the metabolism of fatty acids in the myocardium. By varying the flow rate of water into the phantom, different washout times can be obtained. Additionally, the phantom can be used in a variety of applications including multiple exponential decay and the investigation of input functions. Testing of the phantom using both planar dynamic and image based SPECT protocols show that the phantom accurately reproduces preset washout rates to within 10%. With this level of accuracy attained, we feel the phantom can confidently be used in the development of new dynamic SPECT reconstruction algorithms.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-05-04

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/7841

Physics

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace