BackgroundAs myocardial blood flow measurement (MBF) in SPECT systems became recently available, significant effort has been devoted to its validation. For that purpose, we have developed a cardiac phantom that is able to mimic physiological radiotracer variation in the left ventricle cavity and in the myocardium, while performing beating-like motion. The new phantom is integrated inside a standard anthropomorphic torso allowing a realistic tissue attenuation and gamma-ray scattering Methods and ResultsA mechanical cardiac phantom was integrated in a commercially available anthropomorphic torso. Using a GE Discovery 530c SPECT, measurements were performed. It was found that gamma-ray attenuation effects are significant and limit the MBF measurements to global/three-vessel resolution. Dynamic SPECT experiments were performed to validate MBF accuracy and showed mean relative error of 14%. Finally, the effect of varying radiotracer dose on the accuracy of dynamic SPECT was studied ConclusionsA dynamic cardiac phantom has been developed and successfully integrated in a standard SPECT torso. A good agreement was found between SPECT-reported MBF values and the expected results. Despite increased noise-to-signal ratio when radiotracer doses were reduced, MBF uncertainty did not increase significantly down to very low doses, thanks to the temporal integration of the activity during the measurement