An assessment of attenuation correction of SPECT MPI images generated by deep learning model

Abstract

This article evaluates the effectiveness of using a deep learning network model to generate reliable attenuation corrected the single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI). The authors collected myocardial perfusion imaging data of 88 patients from a SPECT/CT machine, with an average age of 62.47 years. Then, two datasets are created from the original data: set A includes the deep learning-based attenuation corrected images (Generated Attenuation Correction - GenAC), and the non-attenuation corrected images; set B contains only non-attenuation corrected images. These datasets were diagnosed by two doctors (in which, one has 7 years of experience and the other has 10 years of experience in reading SPECT MPI). The doctors diagnose based on the image data without knowing which dataset it belongs to. The sensitivity, specificity, diagnostic accuracy, and lesion rate were evaluated between the two data sets. Results: The average specificity, sensitivity, and accuracy of the set with the deep learning-based attenuation corrected images were 0.87, 0.86, 0.86, while the results with the non-attenuation corrected images are 0.69, 0.83, and 0.78.