A 3-D Method for Delineation of Activity Distributions and Assessment of Functional Organ Volumes with Spect

Abstract

The distribution volume of an organ may have a clinical impact in many cases and various methods have been designed to make volume assessments. In this paper, we describe a new method for delineation of the distribution outline and volume determination. The method is based on smoothing, differentiation, image relaxation and voxel counting of single photon emission computer tomography (SPECT) image sets with 3-D operators. A special routine corrects for the inherent thickness of the voxel-based outline. Phantom experiments, using a SPECT system with LEGP-collimator and a 64×64 acquisition matrix with 6.3×6.3 mm2 pixel size, demonstrated good correlation between the measured and the true volumes. For volumes larger than 120 cc the correlation coefficient was 0.9999 with SE 1.0 cc and an average relative deviation of 0.49%. For volumes below 120 cc, the accuracy was impaired due to low resolution power. By improving the system spatial resolution with an LEHR-collimator and a smaller pixel-size (4.1×4.1 mm2), good accuracy was achieved also for volumes in the range from 3 to 120 cc. Measurements of 15 differently shaped phantoms of volumes between 3 and 104 cc demonstrated high correlation between measured and true volumes: R=0.9921 and SE=0.74 cc (5.3%). For volumes as small as 3 and 5 cc, the difference between the true and the assessed volume was 0.6 cc. The reproducibility of the method was within 3% for volumes above 120 cc and within 7% for volumes below. Due to this accuracy, we conclude that the method can be applied for various clinical routine and research applications using SPECT.