An audit of half-count myocardial perfusion imaging using resolution recovery software

Abstract

The Nuclear Medicine Software Quality Group of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine has conducted a multicentre, multivendor audit to evaluate the use of resolution recovery software from several manufacturers when applied to myocardial perfusion data with half the normal counts acquired under a variety of clinical protocols in a range of departments. The objective was to determine whether centres could obtain clinical results with half-count data processed with resolution recovery software that were equivalent to those obtained using their normal protocols. Sixteen centres selected 50 routine myocardial perfusion studies each, from which the Nuclear Medicine Software Quality Group generated simulated half-count studies using Poisson resampling. These half-count studies were reconstructed using resolution recovery and the clinical reports compared with the original reports from the full-count data. A total of 769 patient studies were processed and compared. Eight centres found only a small number of clinically relevant discrepancies between the two reports, whereas eight had an unacceptably high number of discrepancies. There were no significant differences in acquisition parameters between the two groups, although centres finding a high number of discrepancies were more likely to perform both rest and stress scans on normal studies. Half of the participating centres could potentially make use of resolution recovery to reduce the administered activity for myocardial perfusion scans without changing their routine acquisition protocols. The other half could consider adjusting the reconstruction parameters used with their resolution recovery software if they wish to use reduced activity successfully.