Data Curation for Preclinical and Clinical Multimodal Imaging Studies

Purpose: In biomedical research, imaging modalities help discover pathological mechanisms to develop and evaluate novel diagnostic and theranostic approaches. However, while standards for data storage in the clinical medical imaging field exist, data curation standards for biomedical research are yet to be established. This work aimed at...

Optimized image acquisition for dopamine transporter imaging with ultra-high resolution clinical pinhole SPECT

SPECT can be used to image dopamine transporter (DaT) availability in the human striatum, e.g. for diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD). As traditional SPECT provides limited resolution and sensitivity, we proposed a full ring focusing multi-pinhole SPECT system (G-SPECT-I (Beekman 2015 Eur. J. Nucl. Med. Mol. Imaging 42 S209)) which...

Effects of attenuation map accuracy on attenuation-corrected micro-SPECT images

Background In single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), attenuation of photon flux in tissue affects quantitative accuracy of reconstructed images. Attenuation maps derived from X-ray computed tomography (CT) can be employed for attenuation correction. The attenuation coefficients as well as registration accuracy between SPECT and CT...

Absolute quantitative total-body small-animal SPECT with focusing pinholes

Purpose: In pinhole SPECT, attenuation of the photon flux on trajectories between source and pinholes affects quantitative accuracy of reconstructed images. Previously we introduced iterative methods that compensate for image degrading effects of detector and pinhole blurring, pinhole sensitivity and scatter for multi-pinhole SPECT. The aim of...

Small-animal SPECT and SPECT/CT: Application in cardiovascular research

Preclinical cardiovascular research using noninvasive radionuclide and hybrid imaging systems has been extensively developed in recent years. Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is based on the molecular tracer principle and is an established tool in noninvasive imaging. SPECT uses gamma cameras and collimators to form projection...

High-Resolution Cardiac Rat SPECT: Effect ofDose and Acquisition Time

SPECT imaging with low dose or short acquisition time can lead to very noisy reconstructed images. With the USPECT-II system we study the effect of low-count scans, and 3D Gaussian blurring to suppress statistical errors. Three different groups of short-time cardiac rat scans were derived from a longtime scan. Images were reconstructed and then...